community.embarcadero.com's forums

[ewong 3]

Hi,

I've scanned this forum's post and since I haven't found any mentions, I figured I'd ask.

 

I can't seem to access the forums on community.embarcadero.com.   Since I got messages sent to my email, I know I had logged in there before.   Yet, clicking on the link in the email (since I can't seem to find any mention on forums on the site), brings me to a page that lists external sites (first of which is this site).

 

Can someone please clarify what is going on? 

 

Thanks

 

Ed

[FPiette 385]

They are gone. See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/community/

 

[ewong 3]

34 minutes ago, FPiette said:

They are gone. See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/community/

 

Oh. *sigh*  

 

Thanks for the info.   First they removed the newsgroups.  Now they've given up using forums and opted to have external sources for user help.

 

Ed

[FPiette 385]

The external sources where much much more used.

[Remy Lebeau 1436]

13 hours ago, ewong said:

I've scanned this forum's post and since I haven't found any mentions, I figured I'd ask.

There is some info in this discussion:

 

Edited March 12, 2021 by Remy Lebeau

[FredS 138]

13 hours ago, FPiette said:

The external sources where much much more used

 

You mean while they repeatedly shut down and wipe historic info from the newsgroups and the forum for extended periods?

 

Because I thought it was a perfect split, SO for code stuff and those Newsgroups and Forums for hard to figure out errors and missing documentation.

 

[Dalija Prasnikar 1404]

11 hours ago, FredS said:

You mean while they repeatedly shut down and wipe historic info from the newsgroups and the forum for extended periods?

NNTP forums were the only ones that were really used. They were not shut down and deleted on a whim, but because of software and database problems. Posts were purged in attempts to stabilize and salvage the forums, but failures keep happening. During that time Embarcadero created new web only forums, but they were never extensively used - I am not going to analyze why.... 

11 hours ago, FredS said:

Because I thought it was a perfect split, SO for code stuff and those Newsgroups and Forums for hard to figure out errors and missing documentation.

Well, now you have Delphi Praxis for that. Old forums as such may be lost, but community is not. Many people are here and that is all that matters.

[FredS 138]

7 hours ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

Many people are here and that is all that matters

Not really, that searchable data had huge value. Most weird issues/errors had many iterations of fixes and additional information.

Certainly while stuck with several of those over the years a quick search was all that was needed.. its the difference between a few minutes and an extended pause..

 

[timfrost 79]

I still have the contents of Borland and Embarcadero newsgroups going back to around 2007, searchable in Xananews.  But it is years since I have opened them or searched for anything.

[Darian Miller 366]

4 hours ago, timfrost said:

I still have the contents of Borland and Embarcadero newsgroups going back to around 2007, searchable in Xananews.  But it is years since I have opened them or searched for anything.

 

Interesting... how much data are we talking?  Could it be posted somewhere for download?

[Guest]

Xananews was writed in Delphi, on Github sources

https://github.com/graemeg/xananews

 

here an alternative Giba news

Setup in the following languages :

•  French
•  English
•  Nederlands
•  Italian
•  Spanish
•  Sweden
•  German
•  Danish

http://www.mesnews.net/gb/chargement.php

 

hug

Edited March 13, 2021 by Guest

[timfrost 79]

17 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

Interesting... how much data are we talking?  Could it be posted somewhere for download?

It would take a lot of sorting out to make the content useful. When the server failed, I recall that the re-built server always had new message IDs so the threading failed and one had to start again with a full download in Xananews, with whatever content was still on the new server. So there are gaps and many duplications. 

 

Xananews has a folder for each newsgroup, with one file (messages.dat) containing all the raw NNTP messages and another (articles.dat) with all the threading data. In the messages folder each message starts with a long 'XMsg' header line so each message can be identified; and I think Xananews has the ability to rebuild the 'articles' file as well as maintain it. Xananews can also export messages into plain text files, each message with full NNTP headers and ending with a '.' (but this needs to be done manually for each newsgroup), or whole newsgroups can be compressed and exported, but you would need to study the Xananews Delphi source to unpack them.

 

Xananews used group folders (named by the user) containing each set of folders with a common prefix. The groups I have vary in size from 46 folders of borland.public newsgroups, down to around 36 of embarcadero.public newsgroups.

 

I have four group folders: the "borland" group  is 636MB. The other three folders contain embarcadero.public newsgroups and are respectively 255MB, 427MB and 287MB.

 

Looking in delphi.non-technical (the largest group by message volume) the four group folders run from:
 2004.04.02 to 2008.08.07 borland
 2008.01.02 to 2018.04.21 embarcadero
 2008.08.09 to 2011.01.12 embarcadero
 2008.08.09 to 2011.12.22 embarcadero

 

In some of the borland newsgroups, content starts earlier or later than 2004. For example b.p.announce runs from 1997 to 2003. And where the top level groups overlap, they have different sets of newsgroup folders. In the newsgroup folders, where the texts match, the headers and message IDs are different. Some of the borland message.dat files have all-null-byte gaps where Xananews shows the article with missing text.

 

If someone wants to take on this archaeology project, I can ZIP the files and upload them, but I do not have the time to do much more than this! If anyone has done this already, with better organized backups than mine, I have not heard of them.

[ewong 3]

On 3/13/2021 at 12:17 AM, Remy Lebeau said:

There is some info in this discussion:

 

As someone on that thread said,  that's brutal.  Very brutal to the amount of information on those forums.  While I am very dismayed at Embarcadero's practice of killing/removing vital helpful information, I'm not surprised.  The forum, while not as useful as the newsgroups, at least provided some avenue of help/information.

 

Thanks Remy for the info.  At least I'm glad I can still see quite a few old regulars on the newsgroup.  Perhaps Joanne might even appear here?