I'm not for the domain name in the least.
The historical posts would be nice though.
I would say get a hold of the people who have the orignal Help(dot)com name and see if they would be willing to sell. If not, so be it.
This name is fine and bears a fresh reputation.

Were doing fine here. Help to go sounds like a restaurant. Were good save your money.

They must be making money on the original Help dot com name as that is what they really wanted in the first place.

I agree with my colleagues. They can keep HELPTOGO. We don't need it.

They can keep the name and the data. If they donate the data, i guess we can take it, but buying it is a no from my side... I don't see the value in the data, people come and ask for help and get it and then all is forgotten and irrelevant (somehow). Most of the time people just want somebody to talk too online and to help them. I don't think people go like 5 years from now and go like ok let me see the advise i got 5 years ago and try to apply it...

btw forgot about help(dot)com you have no idea how valuable that name is, actually i believe its the main reason they shut the old one down, because the name is very very very valuable yet the actual forum doesnt make any money...

There is little use with the old logs too in my opinion. Even though we look the same, the code below the surface is totally different. How many years would it take to convert it so it could be loaded into our current set up without it causing numerous crashes or slow response time. Nobody wants that.

Actually, data is generally pretty agnostic. I’d estimate it would take a day of playing with the format to get it to the point where we could import it to this site.

But- like others have said, chances are having that data hosted on here isn’t super important. If we can get the data, storing it in a safe place is never a bad thing. (Then again, I’m kind of a hoarder...) So let’s grab it if we can, but as far as the domain and helptogo forum code... 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for that @Rockster160 The other issue I see is of privacy. Several old members have passed and others have been made aware of this site yet have decided not to return. I believe that having their past being reopened on here would not meet with their approval. We need to see past our own wants and think of others.

To be honest ..... with so many people that has moved on with their lives you are better off without the old data and starting afresh like you have.

The only real problem you got is getting users here.

Is there a way for us to keep the data in an online archive under help-qa?

But how many of us actually read through the old data?

In the spirit of the orignal Help(.)com AND this one, historic members don't get a voice in the matter. For the most part, they knew then, as it is now, that accounts don't close. Hypothetically, if the orignal Help had continued, it would have continued on without them. Further, the few that would love to have their history erased do not compare with the many which have made invaluable Posts in the past. Eddieee, as an example with his poetry and Cathetel also with hers and the many Posts of incredible interest.
I could go even further yet but I shall digress here.

Consider my statement to Soco.

I used to spend hours walking through the abondend halls of the former Posts - some of them from the very beginning - even responded to several that were like...5 & 6 years old and surprisingly some that were never given attention to in the day of their listing. Even more surprisingly, some of those people were drawn back to Help, awed they got a reply after so many years.
People may find it strange given the day we live in (even back then), but they like a positive follow up, even better late than never, it makes them feel special.
The old posts were like a mirror, contrasted with the present time (at that time before the CBS bomb dropped).
It also caused me to wonder how many people we didn't know about, who came back years later to see their own Posts in reflection to the times which moved on.
Just something to consider.

Thanks Robbie. I once considered selling used cars....

I really wholeheartedly agree with big al

As nice as it was, a simple BBCode stock forum never really could replace the old help. Thanks for being there for us in the interim though. As for the URL, I prefer -qa to togo.

None of this would be a problem if CBS weren't greedy but oh well.

It depends. What is the asking price for the historical data? It represents an interesting piece of history so it would be nice to keep it around. But obviously this is a non-profit operation and it is useless to them so funny they wouldn't just donate it. Similar to if you found a completely useless historical artifact that used to belong to someone else. Wouldn't you just give it back to them?

Valid point Lawn. On the other hand, if it is something that IS wanted then it has value. Look no further than a yard/garage/rummage sale.

Who is it that’s trying to sell the data?
I thought CNET originally gave it to you, @Padre_J_Roulston

Thats what I thought ... the bought the ISP but was willing to pass on the data base and the sites coding to anyone willing to start up a new website .... they was only wanted to sell the domain name.

I made a offer for the domain ... turned down the website coding and database but lost out ... the coding and data base was still available after the sale.

The coding was made available for a time to anyone still willing to build a new site.

Gotcha. For some reason I always thought that was you.

So what’s the price for the data?

Keeping the old posts in an archive would be great. I agree with Big Al--if the original site had continued, those posts would have still existed on it.

The helptogo domain name had no real cachet. It would not help us here.

If the data can be retrieved for a nominal cost, I would say let's go for it. Otherwise, we just go on from here!

hahaha $10 sounds more reasonable.

How well do do you think the data can be re-fitted into this system? Can we get a fully operational product even if it was purchased?

I think just about everybody that was there has been moved over here.

Sounds like they’re just trying to do a money grab. So not much we can do. 🤷‍♂️

Is “they” an actual entity, or is it Ryan? Do we know?

That’s too bad.
He did strike me as the greedy type, but didn’t think he’d do something like that. He’s literally just going to delete the data anyway. But I guess if there’s nothing to be done, there’s nothing we can do. 😞

Jonathan, tell Ryan exactly what Rockster just said - that you (Ryan) are just going to delete the old data anyway. Offer him $250 US Dollars. If he accepts, I will pay for the data.

$500 for the data?

That would be what I called "unearned income" and "unjust enrichment."

You're nice.

I call it a hostage affair.

I call a tosser that is trying to take advantage of a loyal group of users of the old site that got ******fucked over by the original owners in the first place.

As stated the data is gona lie somewhere or get deleted, it has no value. If they wana donate it, then why not. Other than that i find it ridiculous to pay any penny for it.

8 years of orignal Help history isn't exactly worthless, fellas....
Granted, it's not worth an arm and a leg but it does have some value.

if they are willing to pay us, we would consider it :P

I'll back Big-Al-One and pitch in half.
$125 from me. Anyone else willing to help?

Very kind of you. If no further help is offered, i'm good with it...
Stone soup is a rough story for many.

🙄 Just greedy. Hostage situation. Should have offered $100 to see. Haha.

Tell them I now say $200 USD or nothing at all and if they refuse...to shove the data up their ***ass.
Copy, paste and quote me to them.

Too late asshole, it's here.
Happy Titanic to you, jackass.

Thank you Jonathan...👍✌

I refer back to my earlier comment

I call a tosser that is trying to take advantage of a loyal group of users of the old site that got ******fucked over by the original owners in the first place.

Well...it seems the only happy ending these guys want is what they get from surfing each others backside.

what a greedy dik

Our success here isn't in your hands nor does it depend on you, retard. The only thing you're going to accomplish is getting NOTHING AT ALL. As for me shutting my mouth for you, come on down and try it.

lol Big-Al-One chill bro, you guys are funny.

Rockster160 did an amazing job with this website, am sure we can expand on it...

I think so too. Prob should invest into some Google power search stats or what ever it's called.

I think another domain name would be nice... but the big question is what ^_^

Why? What's wrong with this domain name and the point of changing it? It's as close to the orignal as it's going to get.
Distressed people write out "Help" on their search browsers.....

the "-qa" is annoying :P does it stand for Quality Assurance?

Question and answers?

Didnt think Ryan would be such a dick. But I guess nothing surprises me now

oh Question and answers sounds good ^_^
i thought it was Quality Assurance lol am such a nerd

The QA is literally me searching for similar short domains and I found it and it worked so I went with it. There was a post talking about what it could mean. I like Questions and Answers. But hey. 🤷‍♂️

What . . . what about "helpme.com"?

helpme.com is taken/unavailable. I think I attempted to contact the owners but never heard back.

helpme.life and helpme.cc are both available for reasonable prices.
Many people are skeptical about domains that aren’t .com so my main original goal was to stick with that.

yeah i think com is the way to go, h4help.com is available for auction starting $15 CAD

I like the new site name.
Obviously, we would all prefer Help.com but the Q/A (Questions/Answers) part fits nicely.

Here is the earlier post Rockster was referring to.

https://help-qa.com/posts/21-okay-time-for-a-li...

Light Bulb!!

Instead of old data let us buy some advertising. Namely in the way of t-shirts. Lets have Big-Al or whoever design some mascot featuring the Help-QA logo. I'm still partial to the A being aardvarks but we can go with something else. I know of a local company here that can probably print them in a day or two,

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/90/af/01/90af01a46427...

I'm not sure about the "help to go" name, it never really appealed to me. $500 seems reasonable for the old data. You can count me in for $100.. it seems kind of strange to quibble over a couple of hundred bucks I made that much before lunch today.

I like looking at the old posts from way back when, it's kind of a link to a part of my life. Whatever we do, let's not lose that over $250.

Honestly my biggest concern is the quality of the data. Chances are, he doesn't have the original data. He HAD the original data, then reformatted the data to fit his forum. Then threw away the original stuff. I haven't dug in super deep to look at the data that's on Helptogo, but I know many of the user's names posts and all of that were kind of messed about.

Even before we throw money at this guy, we definitely need to verify that we're going to have some sort of useable data. Verify what we're actually getting. It think most of the excited voices in this post (myself included) is half-expecting the original data. Most likely, the best we're going to get is

<username> GUEST - No user data, just the name.
<title> (Extracted) from the post, most likely poorly done.
<message> with formatting likely removed.

That's kind of disheartening. The price for the movie rights just fell through the floor... ha ha.

😞 It makes me so sad. I really wish we had a way. That's why I'm so hesitant on the price. If it was the full original database dump, that's a WHOLE different story, but it sounds like it's only the Helptogo data, which... Isn't much. But I could be wrong. 🤷‍♂️

They should pay us to take the Helptogo data.

Yes please!

I really think the 500 dollars is a steal. I want to use the data to write a playwright a book deal and than the movie. I think there's real potential in classic help dot com for a entrepreneur like myself.

Original db or not, it will require some cleaning and refactoring to fit the website db.

My main concern would be the sudden increase of data that might make the website very slow thus requiring an urgent optimization etc... Unless we create special archive tables then things should be less disruptive.

For me peoples attitude and morality are key, I rather drown then be saved by a dick like Ryan

I don't think the financial risk--albeit small--is worth it to get junk, unusable data.

Ryan should just give us the data. And while it would be nice to go back to posts made seven or eight years ago, it probably won't be feasible. I also hate enriching people for work they didn't do. Ryan didn't make those posts--all of US did!

I would also like to propose an "In Memoriam" section for help-qa.com, especially for "Daft Puck," aka Alice Hale, who died two years ago because of stupid doctors in the State of Washington.

As Rockster said, Cinderella's shoe was reformatted to fit the hoof of a pig. It would work, but in a broken sort of way. Not to mention the direct layout of the Posts "over there" are starting to corrupt. I copied/pasted one of my former Post into my Profile (here) for repair. If you want to see what it looks like, visit my Profile.

Technically (and legally) CNET owned every Post authored. When Cryin' Ryan bought the domain name, the dregs (as CNET viewed it) of the Post data went with it. Although it is sad Ryan will not do for us what was done for him (by a big greedy corporate congolmeration, I might add), shows his integrity. Nonetheless, he came to possess the data - right or wrong. I don't defend crap but I recognize the situation for what it is. The idea of a "Pay me what I want or I will burn it," mentality just shows his ***ass when he was never in a position to make demands to begin with. Like Riddick says in the movie..."You should have took the money Tumes." Now you get nothing.

Not to be indelicate, but how would that work? Would it include former members who have passed, like Felicity, and others whose names we cannot know? A shrine for those yet to pass?
I loved Daft as many did, but a memorium seems to be a difficult matter. ?

holy ****shit Daft passed too! Yeah i was thinking the same, a memorial section would be nice...

Just a link that said, "In Memoriam," and list those members who have passed on, with the date of their passing, and maybe a word as to whether they served as a moderator, or major contributor, or whatever.

And, although I have no plans to "pass" any time soon, the idea of a shrine to me right now is actually appealing!

Just need to clear one item regarding ownership. CNET directors created Help..com As a truly altruistic site for mainly teenagers and young adults to get answers about all sorts of different topics. They were allowed to have the site hosted on CNET's servers as long as they worked on it on their own time. It was never meant to make any money -- not one dime.
CBS Interactive comes along several years later and made an offer to buy several sites from them, mainly GAME STOP. Other sites were included in the sale. Only under CBS were ads ever introduced. Still it made very little money for the sheer volume of bandwidth (at the time) it was making. For that sole reason the domain name along with the posts and data was sold.
The fact still remains, we collectively, are all here for altruistic reasons; to help others to the best of our ability. I hope and pray this site continues long after our passing to do exactly that.

I still remember those stupid, obnoxious and intrusive ads that would SLIDE IN from the bottom right of your screen and obscure whatever you were viewing. There was a setting you could do that would stop them. I did that and it worked for a while, but it seems that they came back. You would click on the little X box on them to make them go away, but you would then be transported to the advertiser's site.

To this day, whenever I see any pop-up ad to subscribe to a site, I delete it without even thinking about it.

Is he on this site?

No. But, I forwarded it from a relayed message that was sent to me.

I think we should make new old posts here and leave the past in the past and they are not getting my money

I'd put money on he has been on from the start, or near enough.

It would be nice to have all our old stuff back, but is it worth it?
It'll likely be next to useless, but more than that, it's paying a ransom to someone who doesn't give a ****shit about us, our history, or help.

We'll see what it looks like.
If passable I'll gladly help compensate Eddieee.
But as Rockster said in regard of what's been done with it....it really seems iffy.
Meanwhile....SMH.....

Thank you Eddieee! You've given us hope.

IMHO, any money transactions regarding Help-QA should go through @Rockster160 Those of us that want to help offset this payment can do so through the donate page.

I agree.
I have been talking with Padre and he has been working behind the scenes to negotiate a new price of $300 for the data. I figure those interested in contributing should make their donations here. Once the $300 is raised, Rocco and Padre can make the final arrangements for delivery of the data.
That being said, I have ask Padre to determine the state of the data to better determine exactly what they are selling.
This is my last communication with Padre:
"What about the data itself, is it the original Help.com data in it's entirety or is the helptogo.com data? If it is the original data, has it been altered or reformatted in any way?"

At this point we are waiting to hear back.

maybe he is busy sucking his own kok

😦 Oh!......so NOW you feel me uh?😂😂😂😂😂😂

hahaa am chilled man, just stating the obvious ^_^

😄

Honestly I’d prefer the old stuff to be lost forever. There are posts on there I wish were never made. That site has caused me so much paranoia, being looked up, and freaking out when someone tells me they have. Unfortunately I was stupid when I was young, and I’d rather not be reminded of it.

Data law is governed and regulated by the country and state of which the host is registered. Unfortunately laws are being processed at a slow rate and economics play a large role. All info here is for the purpose of helping, not generating a "customer base" profit generating data base. The data should be given free or destroyed as it relates to terms of the privacy act of the registered host.
That's all I know. There is an emotional side and a business side. Emotional...no real benefit. Business side, larger data base...possibility. Too much energy and resources vs benefit. A good researcher could achieve the same goal given time and tools.

I must say, I'm quite nervous about my old data being used to gain profit. My posts were very personal to me, and it scares me that they may be used as SEO without my permission.

Ryan would be the only one "gaining profit"- and even then, the "profit" would likely be backfilling for any charges that have come through. I don't imagine he found a free way to host the old site, and storing all of that data comes at a price as well. I don't approve of the way it's being dangled at all, but at least there is a chance the data is safe.

As far as SEO- the only time it would do anything towards that is if somebody searched for a very specific term that was within one of your posts. In those cases, your posts would be helping other people.

However, with that said, when/if we do get the data, I plan to host them on a separate server that will act as an "archive" - That site will have links back to here, but no links here to there. We can do a poll vote or something in regards to blocking SEO there- so that Robots/search engines won't index that data, meaning nobody will be able to find the data using a search engine. Personally, that seems like a waste to me- hiding things that can help people.

It's impossible to make everybody happy, so I will do my best to adhere to the community's majority wishes. I know there is a LOT of sensitive data there. Painful memories and experiences. Some embarrassing, some shameful- but we've all been there. I've got a lot in there that I don't want to relive either, but the point is to be able to help others. We've learned from our mistakes and moved on, but there are still people living through those same problems right now- I personally think if there are people that can be helped even just by seeing that others have gone through it, it's worth it.

I'm with most people here I say we should leave it. This is a fresh start for all of us. If the old data is going to cause heartbreak and distress what's the point of opening up old wounds..

Somehow I do not see newcomers "mining" all of those old posts.

http://i68.tinypic.com/2nr32ow.jpg

What do our registrations look like, Big Al One? Bet you it looks very similar. At the beginning registration was very high. Now, maybe 1 or 2 a month.
Similarly, registrations for the KKK or Black Panthers were high during their hey day. Today, very very little if at all.
Laugh at Ryan if you want to, but that is the nature of many, many online sites.

Those stats look amazing compared to ours. 😂
Maybe I'll add a page somewhere to show stats like that. Let's see what I can do for now. 😛

Monthly- not very helpful as we've only been running for a couple of months:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/85053...

Weekly, to show better data:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/85053...

Compared to HelpToGo: (Still weekly)
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/85053...

Bottom line - you care. So do many of us. We'll grow, and membership will increase over time.

👍

- Which brings to mind; did you know that you were the last person to have the most popular post at the orignal Help before it closed?

On a side note, there use to be an invite button.

Right! And then a list of all your friends would reveal with little boxes to check (or not).

@Max @BA1 - that feature was replaced with the tagging system- like I’ve demonstrated here. 😄

Just do @ then type the name of the person you want to invite, and they’ll be notified. If they’re not already on the post, it will show you invited them. Otherwise they should get a notification in the invites saying you mentioned them. :)

No, I was not aware of that. Thanks.
Kinda of like being the last person in a Sears before they shutter the doors.

Right here in data heaven.
"And I, Soco, saw a wonder in the digital matrix..."

https://web.archive.org/web/20140119020127/http...

Looks like Ryan was able to track down the original data, and it appears to be in an even better state than I expected. It appears to be the original database dump/backup, which means everything is there, and in the original formatting. It actually looks like it's the best case scenario.

That said, the file is QUITE large. About 10 gigs worth, which makes working with it a pain in the butt because every operation/translation on it takes ages.
Also, the language it's in is pretty outdated.
Imagine trying to translate an entire book from Ancient Chinese to Current English all at the same time- but if you make a grammar error, the whole thing fails and you have to restart from the beginning. 😅

Anyway- things are looking good. I sent him the money, and he has delivered the original database. He's working on sending the data from HelpToGo as well, but having a little harder time exporting that stuff.

Oh- also, before hopes go too high. While the existing database is intact, all externally hosted files are gone, which means avatars and pretty much any and every image.

Also also- the above so far is all speculation. The database appears to be correct and intact, but that's looking at it as a whole, the details are yet to be carefully examined.

EDIT: May have celebrated a little too early. It looks like this file is the formatted HelpToGo stuff. Still has all of the posts and such, but that seems to be the main usefulness of it. Ryan's got another file he's trying to send, so we'll see if that's any better.

I consider this a lucky turn of events. Take your time Rockster. If needed, ask for help.[Goes without saying...]

I think the old help posts are inside Misc and they have the idiot mark of "- import" or something, I was planning on scrapping the site and get all the post :P, then was like nah screw it.

I can look into the database and try to import it to separate archive db, if you want.

It's looking like I definitely spoke too soon. :(

It's going to get crazy trying to un-format this, but let's see how it goes. 😄

@tricky - I've got the HelpToGo DB in MySQL, but our server runs on PSQL. So going to have to migrate that beast. There's ~250 tables, the majority of which look like garbage. (Who stores the meta data for the site in the database?) - Also a number of duplicate tables, for which I have no guesses why.

I tried scraping the site at one point as well- they make you wait 8 seconds between each page of posts though, and there were something like 35k pages. So I, too, was like nah screw it.

I was really hoping the database didn't store the raw HTML for topics/comments, but, alas, they do. So going to have to have a script run through all of those and remove special characters, fix up the HTML into the markdown style that we use here, and remove any of the extra stuff. (Like the - IMPORT)

And I was/am currently planning on just including the HTG posts/replies as well, since at this point- why not if it's all in the same format anyway?

Have you run a count on all tables? Perhaps most of them are empty. Any sign of the non post data mentioned (users, shouts)?

Between 01/14 - 07/14, helptogo had help's domain, so that chart makes sense.

Yeah, a few of them are also empty. But many of them seem to be tracking HTG specific data that we don't care about. Settings, forum tools, and such.
I actually looked at every table and glanced over the data in each one to try to extract the useful ones. Looks like I grabbed about 16 of them. And even a couple of those are duplicates.

It seems there ARE shouts, but glancing over some of the data, some seem to be post-Help. Did HTG have shoutboxes?
But yes, Shouts are there. There is user data- but it's HTG user data. Good news and bad news. Emails are there.... That's about all that's useful. Not sure how it would be taken, but we could send out an email to all of those user's and say Help has returned and invite them back. Would make it explicit that they wouldn't be getting any further emails from us though so they don't think it's spam. Haha.

x_utf_posts
x_utf_topics
x_utf_message_topics
x_utf_message_posts
forums_topics
forums_posts
core_message_posts
core_polls
x_utf_polls
core_voters
shoutbox_shouts
x_utf_shoutbox_shouts
x_utf_profile_portal
x_utf_profile_friends
x_utf_members
core_members

As you can see- a few possible duplicates, and honestly I'm not sure what the difference between topics and posts is.

Sort of; shoutboxes / messages were a later feature, and permitted multiple users by invitation, as far as I recall.

In the client side terminology, topics & posts are equivalent to posts & replies here, respectively. Dunno if it's the same in storage.

Are you testing in production, by any chance?

What do you mean testing in Production?

So far, everything I've done has been via CLI. It's still going to be quite a bit before the data will be able to work with the front end and be visible through any actual UI.

It does not appear that the shouts/users include the original Help's user data.

But again- this is exploring via CLI, so it's not exactly the most reliable info in the world.

Not sure I understand much of what was just said. Okay. Absolutely nothing. But I would clean first than import. If that is possible that is.

That's the plan. 👍

I don't think it would be a bad thing to send out notices of Help's return to the said collection of e-mails gathered.
Can likely expect some addresses to have expired or have been abandoned, etc....
How would you accomplish that at bulk rate? I assume there are 10's of thousands of them. I don't see Padre ever leaving the house if he was put to the task of replying to every one of them.👀

You'd be surprised. Not many people respond to emails- especially ones that are obviously bulk emails. I could respond to them. 🙂

However, it's not 10's of thousands. It looks like the emails are only from HTG, so probably not many people from there that aren't here already. :(

EDIT: Actually, looks like there are 2,700 in there. Not bad!

Sounds like a great idea!

I don't even remember most of the posts I made on the original help.com. It will be like reading an old diary, I think :) So much nostalgia!

I cheated a little bit and read through a couple of mine. Definite nostalgia!

I didn't send you any money. What is it? $75 to the link on this site? Sorry been kind of out of pocket.

and if its usable and seeable what are you guys going to do with it? put it on here?

@danihatesyou It's "usable". Right now it's raw data so it takes some work to be able to actually look through it. It's also formatted to HTG's ugly format, so it's going to take some time to make it nice.

I won't host it on here, per say. I'll host a copy of the site under a different subdomain. It will basically look exactly the same and seem the same in every way, except the old data will be there and the new data here. I'll make it obvious on that one that it's only old data, but yep. That way it's on a different database, so won't slow anything down here, but still accessible.

@DocteurRalph - Yep, I sent him the $300 and I believe the plan was to split it up among you guys and send either through the Donate page or whatever other means you're comfortable with.

I think it's a great idea to send an email to all the old users.

Got it. I went ahead and sent $100, just in case someone else doesn't do what they said.

It's been received. 🙇 Thank you, Ralph! Much appreciated.

Also sounds like the email idea is pretty well received. I was skeptical at first, but what could it hurt?

You could always max my credit card out for ten grand... that would hurt. I trust you for some reason, after all you do live in the land of Mormons. lol

Absolutely not. Money does not have enough value to me that I would hurt somebody else (especially one with kind intentions) in order to gain more of it unfairly.

AND, all of the transactions are done through a third party. (Which is about 1000x more trustworthy and reliable than PayPal)

AND banks are usually pretty good. If you tell them it was an unauthorized withdrawal they can pull it back and cause a lot of trouble on the other end. (Which, if you ever buy anything online and start to see weird transactions pulled from your bank, you should do so immediately.)

Also, I may be surrounded by them, but I myself am not Mormon. 😊 But hey 🤷‍♂️ I still have morals and standards. 😉

Pay Pal works pretty good too. They refunded me some money I sent to a fake shopping mall. Like $300...

PayPal is very sketchy. They’re widely used, but they’ve had MANY infractions of being hacked, freezing accounts, freezing funds, etc.

I lost my trust for PayPal a loooong time ago.

I lost my trust in Paypal years ago. A friend sent money for me to hold for them and then the money was frozen. In the end, I didn't get the money they sent and was charged a fee from my bank to boot.
Needless to say, I never used PayPal after that.

As for the current goings on . .
I never did get an update from anyone regarding the final transaction but I'm glad to see it went through.

For my part, I have sent the money I promised and hope there are usable bits and bytes in there somewhere.

@Eddieee - Received. Thank you!

The final transaction was $300 - sent late last week.

The data is received on my end, and I've got a script running to convert the database right now. Unfortunately, because of database inconsistencies, I was unable to get a super efficient conversion, so I'm doing it "manually". (Manually automated. Makes sense in my head. The script is doing all of the work, but I had to manually write the script that extracts and converts each piece.)

Anyway. There is a LOT of data, I expect the script is going to have to be left running for probably a week before the data is all imported.

The next step after that is to attempt to reformat the data, which should go MUCH faster. Then it will be ready to send up to the interwebs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100724044034/http...

Well that does take me back . .

https://web.archive.org/web/20100715231425/http...

you can even read shouts

Posted . . "One day, one hour ago . . .

Wow that's a bad picture of Dani you posted there Eddieeee... now that I think about it, it might not be a good idea to see what I was writing 10 years ago. Yeah I joined almost exactly 10 years ago, hmmmmm and I haven't changed a bit. LOL Same old Club man.

In most cases, people don't change DocteurRalph, the truth is, we are far less in control then we think we are.

This one's yours Eddieee
https://web.archive.org/web/20100715231425/http...

This one's yours Doc -
https://web.archive.org/web/20101123065730/http...

me me me! ^_^

https://web.archive.org/web/20100105084744/http...

Crazy....and my typing hasn't gotten any better.

What kind of reformatting do you have in mind for the first pass, apart from amending encoding? Meaning, do you plan to fit the data to the helpcom 'wrapper', or leave it as htg / bbcode? (Assuming it's still the htg tables rather than whatever's backed up from the old site.)

I can’t find me! :(

Actually, for the first pass it’s purely table reformatting.

Reassigning the column names, particularly.
Normally that’s feasible from the SQL side, but in a few cases it’s necessary to use two columns together to get information.

It doesn’t seem that HTG had an “Anonymous” option, so in order to extract that information, multiple columns have to be compared. Also things like DOB, usernames that changed with time, and for some odd reason many of the posts don’t belong to any user. (They have an invalid/placeholder foreign key.) So I’ve needed to store info in the new DB, then compare the new data with existing data to attempt to fill in the blanks.
It works great, with the unfortunate downside of taking about 100x longer.

The first wave isn’t changing any of the “data” at all- just attempting to convert the database formats.

Next wave is to fix the actual data. HTG converted everything into HTML formatting, which I’m assuming was allowed when posting topics there? So I’m going to have to do another run where that data can be converted back into markdown.

So you're running a left join to merge the guest id in a new table?
Any clue where the orphan data may have originated - perhaps wiped / temp users or somesuch? Or if we're talking millions, the old site's posts?

Essentially, yes. But because of the conflicting columns, I’m having to iterate through each one in a loop in order to convert it properly, since the join doesn’t have anything to connect to, in most cases.

And yeah- most of the data is imported data from the original Help. For some reason or another, a LOT of information was lost in that import. 80% of the posts have a “0” user_id, but they DO store the username of the poster, which is convenient AND the only indication if the post was left anonymously instead of having a boolean that tracks that. (That gets super awkward in that time period where everybody changed their name to some form of “Anony” or “Anonymous”) Other posts connect properly and may have a user id, but that user doesn’t exist in the database- so I’m attempting to then create a placeholder user from that information that tracks any and all info available.

Done. (Sort of)

[https://help-qa.com/posts/422-the-help-com-arch...]

Good job and big step completed:)

Will donate soon.

Glad I pitched in.

ooohhh it goes back to when cbs bought it