Thoughts on Cleaning Thread: Deals/Look What I Found

[racketboy]

Curious everyone's take on this -- what if we cleaned up the really massive thead here:
Video Game "Look what I found". viewtopic.php?t=10186

We could keep up to a certain point, but have the first post still have the intro.

I'm trying to look for opportunities to clean up old high-post-count threads that aren't useful reference.

Downsides?

Other threads to nominate for similar treatment?

[pierrot]

The only thing I find kind of unfortunate to lose with that thread is the mountain of historical data in it. Also, on a personal note, (possibly) my first posts on the forums were in that thread, with accounts of a lot of the things I picked up before I left Japan for the last time in 2012. I could screen shot them, though, if there's just a heads-up when it's going to be culled.

It is a pretty insane concentration of posts for a single thread, though. So I can understand the idea to trim it down.

I could be drawing a bunch of bows and arrows at myself, but for a number of years now (possibly since its inception) the games acquired threads have seemed to be mostly bare lists that are serving more of a proxy role for personal records. Not sure if previous years' threads serve much purpose sitting around on the forums. They only really account for some 8,000-ish posts, though, not 23000+.

[racketboy]

I like saving useful data, in general. In the case of the Deals thread, do you mean like sale prices things used to sell for?
I guess my thought on this particular thread is that these are rare-ish, limited time deals that also don't have structured data that is able to make use of.

I'll look into the Games Aquired, but could feel more "structured" and not as storage, intensive. I'll give it thought and weigh against any other nominations.

Thank you!

[o.pwuaioc]

I like saving useful data, in general. In the case of the Deals thread, do you mean like sale prices things used to sell for?
I guess my thought on this particular thread is that these are rare-ish, limited time deals that also don't have structured data that is able to make use of.

I'll look into the Games Aquired, but could feel more "structured" and not as storage, intensive. I'll give it thought and weigh against any other nominations.

Thank you!

Is there a way to split the thread up and lock/archive them?

[racketboy]

Well, my focus is more on database size. Locking them won't change that aspect.

[pierrot]

I like saving useful data, in general. In the case of the Deals thread, do you mean like sale prices things used to sell for?

Yeah, they're mostly outliers, so I didn't mean that the data was useful for per se, but I think it's very interesting. Not that I really do, but it can be fun to visit a random page in that thread and just see some of the wild deals people managed to snag, and there are some pretty historically big hauls peppered in there too. That's all I really meant by it.

I'll look into the Games Aquired, but could feel more "structured" and not as storage, intensive. I'll give it thought and weigh against any other nominations.

Well, my focus is more on database size. Locking them won't change that aspect.

Maybe this is the same thing for o.p, but I thought maybe from the note about the games acquired threads being broken down into multiple threads that you might be saying they're less resource intensive compared to a single thread with over 23000 posts. If that were the case, then I'd also probably be more in support of breaking out the "Look what I found" thread into multiple smaller archived threads, in whatever post block size would make them manageable (eg. 2000 posts per thread, or what have you).

If it's just an issue of the raw post count across all threads, and breaking it down into smaller threads won't actually free up resources, then so be it.

[o.pwuaioc]

You could also submit it all to InternetArchive first. It's been a while since I've worked on forum stuff, but there used to be plenty of archiving hacks which saved on database size.

Here's a recent thread on PHPBB that goes into options:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2539001

[racketboy]

Cool -- thanks, I'll dig into that.
If there's stuff of value, I tend to lean towards keeping it as-is so we don't have to work about broken links/SEO damage and all that.
I guess my main goal is to identify stuff that isn't really much value.

An example is us cleaning out BST listing that were older than a certain time frame. Yes, that could be interesting for random browsing to see what people were listing things for back in the day, but it's just so unstructured and not practical, you know?