neowin Bulk of old forum post's links restored, search will be a bit wonky for another day

[Steven P. Administrators]

Hi Guys,

 

I am pleased to announce that @DaveLegg found an old backup of our forum database from before the 4.0 upgrade and has been successful in merging that content with our database with the old post links *intact*  

 

The only downside to this is that we still miss proper in/outbound links in posts for roughly the first half of 2015, due to the age of that backup.

 

For the next day or so the search will be a bit wonky because the forums are reindexing the entire database, which is obviously taking up some processing power on the db server/SQL.

 

If there are threads that haven't been covered from restoration that you want me or a mod to fix, please contact me or a moderator to fix the post. It helps if these are restricted to threads that are still active, guides, member reviews and suchlike.

 

Many thanks for sticking with us on this and many thanks to Dave for getting around to fixing it!

[LimeMaster]

Good job!

 

Only issue I've found so far is that it converts some characters to question marks.

[DaveLegg Developer]

28 minutes ago, LimeMaster said:

Good job!

 

Only issue I've found so far is that it converts some characters to question marks.

Do you have a link to a post where that has happened as an example? I can probably do something about that...

[cork1958]

Searching on this site has always been a bit wonky for me. I have better luck doing a search on a search engine and just adding neowin at the end of search term.

 

Glad to see any known issues getting worked on though

[LimeMaster]

50 minutes ago, DaveLegg said:

Do you have a link to a post where that has happened as an example? I can probably do something about that...

Here:

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1157536-installing-virtual-pc-2007-sp1-on-windows-8-rtm-64-bit/

[DaveLegg Developer]

4 hours ago, LimeMaster said:

Here:

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1157536-installing-virtual-pc-2007-sp1-on-windows-8-rtm-64-bit/

Thanks for that. Unfortunately it looks like the original backup I was able to recover the links from was taken using the wrong character encodings to preserve those symbols, and emoji's etc (utf8 vs utf8mb4), as I've checked on my test site where I have that backup restored, and they're displaying as ? there too. So unfortunately we'll be stuck with the odd ? in posts, but at least all of the links to other content are working properly again

[HawkMan]

wonky. as in recent/unread being completely useless ?