Hijacked thread?

[Cleokitty]

Hi, moderators. I don't know where else to post this, but the thread:https://www.renovateforums.com.au/sh...g+veranda+post , has been hijacked and goes to an unrelated site.

[DJ’s Timber]

Hi Cleokitty

It’s an old RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from before that has copied over from WWF

[Cleokitty]

Thank you for the prompt response.

How can I get to the Renovate Forum's current incarnation, please? I tried several threads that fizzled after the initial post. I'm using the link at the top of the Woodwork Forum to get to the Renovate forum.

Thank you.

[DJ’s Timber]

You are on the current Renovate Forum.

Unfortunately everything that was on the old RF has been lost due the owners just shutting it down, we tried to buy it back but was meet with dead silence. Think they wanted to change it to a different format which also directed you to Tradies who paid for advertising, not 100% sure what happened in the end.

[r3nov8or]

15 year old RSS feed posts point to the wrong RF URL, unsurprisingly

[Cleokitty]

Thank you DJ. So, the Renovate link on Woodwork Forums takes us to this current forum, same name, where NEW posts and replies will show up but the OLD forum posts won't?

Sorry if i"m having trouble understanding this!

[DJ’s Timber]

In a word Yes.

Here is a cut and paste from an old thread which should hopefully explain what happened.

I registered a new profile with WWF so I could literally come here to express my disbelief and overwhealming disappointment at this news.

Good on you Stuckster... I'm sure what you said here will ring true for a lot of people.

I knew OneFlare had bought RenovateForums.com back in 2014, but I never for a minute believed they would take down the whole damn site after 23 years... and for what? To funnel the traffic into their paid services Oneflare and Airtasker?? Sorry but that just ain't gonna happen. Everyone loved RF because it was free! Good people volunteering their time and knowledge to help each other. DIYers who didn't want to pay for tradies if they didn't need to.

The greatest loss of course is the mountains of knowledge accumulated over it's 23 year history. You could have made an entire volume of encyclopedias with the amount of content there. I have personally completed several successful house renonvation projects on the back of advice from the amazing community at RenovateForum. It has gotten me out of more than a few jambs!

I shudder to think of the number of hours the community spent collectively building such a vast repository of useful information. There were literally thousands of nuggets of wisdom contributed by experts with decades of experience on the job, simply snuffed out with the flick of a switch!

For what it's worth we still have lots of threads and posts in here that date back to 2002 when I started original forum reno forums up until the takeover by Oneflare in late 2008 when I was doing the updated feeds myself before there were RSS feeds. Those feeds like the RSS feeds are all but useless without the forum they linked to.

But I refuse to believe that OneFlare was simply ditched it all. Surely it still has significant value to someone, if not to them. Why not sell the content to another operator to host under a new domain to preserve all the precious information? Or move to a subscription model, charge members a few bucks a month to keep it running?? Most forums aren't worth anything much money wise anymore 20 years ago WWF was worth 1.5 million AU$ now maybe $50,000, Renovate Forum top maybe $10,000. Drop in the ocean to the multi millionaire owner who couldn't care less. All they've succeeded in doing is letting down and pissing off tens of thousands of community members (and potential customers) who will now probably never use Airtasker or Oneflare ever again. Agree.

I tried very hard to get Renovate Forum back from Oneflare/Airtasker with an offer that would have been extremely beneficial for them. But a number of emails and phone calls got no response from anyone with and even an inkling of authority other than a recorded massage and robotic reply with a serial number that lead to nowhere or no one. The CEO of Oneflare was the only person to speak to me but was busy looking for a job and wanted nothing to do with the forums. He gave me contact info for CEO of Airtasker who is basically un in touchable. Private email, and uncontactable by phone, etc.

Hence Renovate Forums was reopened for posting here with not much new in it. We had RSS feeds for a number of years but an RSS feed is useless without a link to the forum it came from and if that forum no longer exists they are completely useless so most of them aren't on here. Those RSS feeds were only to the original forums on here and never included forums added after the takeover.

Is there any way the content could be retreived??

In short... it would appear to be a big fat NO!

- Scraping?
- Internet archive - Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
- Google cached pages

Wayback Machine is about the only way the info can be read. Can't be copied otherwise it would all be here now. Have had the computer guru look into it and the general consensus is... Um, ahh, NUP!
Hard to believe it is all just gone!

So wasteful, so disrespectful. Agreed.

I will forever detest Oneflare for doing this. You won't be the only one, however I think the culprit may well be Airtasker.

LONG LIVE RenovateForums
...and now WoodWork Forums!

[Cleokitty]

Thank you, DJ, for going to the trouble of digging that up and republlshing it. I'm sure that will clarify the issue for a lot of members.
It's too bad about all that good content being lost. Another forum I belong to started in 1999 (I didn't join till later). It historically had lively, polite, problem-solving conversations and excellent in-depth contributions from members. Though participation has diminished it still has most of its old posts intact thanks to its being run by the same dedicated owner since inception. Some posts were lost to a hack. Sadly, participation is dropping off as people move to social media groups where the quality of the input seems to diminish as monetisation of the content rises to prominence.

Rant over! Keep up the good work. it's appreciated.

[Cleokitty]

Just tried to 'Thank' and 'Like' your post but it's not registering!

[DJ’s Timber]

Thank you, DJ,.

No worries

Just tried to 'Thank' and 'Like' your post but it's not registering!

Yes that problem is on the list

[ubeaut]

Sorry. Missed this one. Bit late but here goes anyway.

Thanks likes are no longer supported and try as we might we can't get them working on here and they have also disappeared from Woodwork Forums, yet strangely they're still working on Metalwork Forums and I have no idea why or for how long they will work over there.

All 3 forums are running the same program, all 3 are configured the same but only 1 is working.

Just about to pull the plug in the Reno one. This forum should be used to having the plug pulled by now. If I can get it running again I will reinstall it, if not members will just have to say thanks etc. the way we all did 25 years ago before that Likes/Thanks hack existed.

You know how... use your words.

Cheers

PS for what it's worth I still can't get a rise out of Artasker.
Also the first 6+ years of posts are still on these forums or at least as many as I could muster after bringing it back home to WWF where it began and then putting it back onto its own site again.

[r3nov8or]

Thanks