Missing pictures.

[Cliff Rogers]

I have added a note to my signature.

[A Duke]

Hi,
It would seem to me, at least in my case, that the couple of pictures that have not gone AWOL in my posts and 'manage attachments' file, are the ones that have been posted in more than one post. I have not checked if the subsequent posts have been out of the black hole period.

I thought that no one gave a rat's when it took so long for responses to my OP but some of the dummy spits since have shown how wrong I was. They must have been getting over the shock. I wonder how long they were missing before we woke up, I had a clue, which I missed, when a new member asked for more details on an early post as the pictures were gone.
Regards

[woodPixel]

If you were to buy a magazine prior to 2012 and every image referred to were deleted (even the placeholders deleted), the value would be less than zero. It's just a lump of text.

Why not delete all the posts prior to 2012?

No doubt the same issue/topic/idea will be discussed 17 times in short order.

[chambezio]

As distressing and annoying the loss of these pictures has been, it highlights to me, just how tentative electronic storage is. It seems that no matter how "secure" the storage is the loss of pics is a real problem. Not only on this Forum but our own storage at home could be facing a similar problem. When we took photos and stored them on slides or photographic paper, storage could be attacked by silverfish or mould, so now we have the electronic equivalent.

I am sorry for those who have taken the losses personally and taken their bat and ball home never to return. It seems its no one person's fault but just "how it is".

I think if we adopt Cliff Rogers statement that if someone needs some pics we should make them available.

[Bob38S]

Exactly.

I was, at first, unaware of the anxiety this has caused some of our members, it is what it is, we all need to deal with it. Am I thrilled - no way, it has simply happened so let's fix what we can, move on and enjoy the forum.

[BobL]

Here's a few compilations of mine that might amuse.
Each photo represents a few from each year of the missing images.
Don't worry I didn't do these especially for this event - I used to do them at the end of every year to remind me what I actually did in the shed.

Combo2006s.jpg

Combo2007s1.jpg

2008.jpg

woodcomposites.jpg

[woodPixel]

BobL's picture compilation was incredibly interesting.

A new feature to have a daily preview of somebody's photos and have them clickable going to the related thread?

Show 100 or 200 photos at a time... It would be excellent!

[BobL]

BobL's picture compilation was incredibly interesting.

A new feature to have a daily preview of somebody's photos and have them clickable going to the related thread?

Show 100 or 200 photos at a time... It would be excellent!

Any linking made on those images above will lead to a bunch of threads without any images in them.

[woodPixel]

As a software developer you'd think of that and write the program only to show threads that had images

After all, how would one display an image if it weren't present? If it weren't present, it wouldn't display, therefore nothing to click...

[chode]

As a reasonably new member this is absolutely devastating. There are so many old threads I was looking forward to reading but I'm struggling to make any sense of most. The "Challenge to make the homemade router" thread from 03 for example.

As the loss of your data was caused by a 3rd party, can no action be taken against them?

[deg-from-melb]

I'll go along with the previous comments, having been a system
administrator (AKA backroom guru) We used to say that doing
a good job as a SysAdmin is like wetting yourself in a dark suit
-- you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices.

But if anything goes wrong, the proverbial impacts the air
impeller.

I still work as a webmaster for a group that I belong to, the
above rules apply there, with the addition of major changes
coming by surprise a day or two before they need to "go live".

So, the back room guys have my sympathy, particularly since
it is most likely that the problem was with software that
someone else developed and not with their deployment of
the package. One of the reasons that the website that I
work with is all programmed by me. (Note: I am definitely
not suggesting that this should be the case here. The
sort of forums running here are a common solution and
re-inventing the wheel is not worth the effort, particularly
since I suspect that many of the "support" people would
rather have their hands on a bit of timber instead of a
keyboard.

It would have been nice to see the photos I was looking for,
but I'll live.

-Don

[Dry Water]

Just letting everyone know - I have replaced all my missing pics!! Big job but done and am sticking with this Forum

[Robson Valley]

I've long since forgotten how many and which pictures I included in a bunch of threads, mostly in the Wood Carving or Sharpening Forums.
Same thing happened in two other wood carving web sites. In Wood Carving Illustrated, I'll guess that 10's of thousands of pictures, many TB, evaporated.

I lay the blame solely at the feet of the software developers = they can't find their butts with both hands in a brightly lit room.
Because of these 3 site failures, I'm not willing to shoot the piano players.

But since woodworking is such a visual activity, I really hope that site sponsors pay very close attention to what they get for the money.
Just the other day, I read that VBulliten is getting rusty. Huh? If it ain't busted, don't fix it until it is. Instead, some sites have found
something new and shiny, OOOOOOOOOOHHH! Visual support? I have not enjoyed these tests.

[ubeaut]

Just letting everyone know - I have replaced all my missing pics!! Big job but done and am sticking with this Forum

Well done Laurie. I'm proud of you for being one of the only members with the getup and go to actually have a go.

It's a bit disappointing a few more who lost pics haven't tried to at least have a go at replace some of them, instead of throwing their hands up in the air and giving up.

I would love to be able to restore all the alost pics but it just can't be done by anyone other than the original poster.

Cheers - Neil

[woodPixel]

....but worse things could and have happen like the loss of almost 6 mths worth of posts around 12 or 13 years ago, twitter, Donald Trump, selfies, Justin Bieber, online pictures of cats, Donald Trump, automated phone answering, Justin Bieber, spam phone callers, scam phone callers, lifestyle TV shows, Donald Trump, the list just goes on.

The awefulness of this post has come to be true! Glorious Leader is psychic!

Reaaallly dumb question: are the images deleted, or has the forum software simply deleted the reference to it? I.e are there orphaned unreferenced images?

I ask as I was (am?) a dev for 15 years (PHP, java, perl, .Net) and could write up a script to find unreferenced/orphaned images, get their date time and try to match those to posts. I could do this at night, gratis, for fun. If that is fruitful, then write a module to admin all the fixes to trusted individuals.

Edit: just found post 28. Sorry