Backup of TI-BANK forums available

[DJ Omnimaga]

Due to the deletion of TI-BANK forums a few days ago, several precious informations among over 100000 posts were lost from the TI community. However, thanks to jimbauwens, a backup was made a few weeks before, as there were talks about a possible TI-BANK shutdown. The backup is in read-only mode, so you can no longer post nor register and 2 weeks of posts are missing, but if you know French or can manage to read it through translate tools, this might be useful to you, as this Forumotion/Forumactif-hosted board had a lot of stuff that is not available anywhere else in the TI community.

Backup URL: http://tibank.bwns.be/

This backup was mentionned in TI-BANK news before, but the news was deleted along with a few others. TI-BANK now got a new forum, built-in directly into the website, so if you speak French and cannot find what you need at the backup URL, you can ask question once again on TI-BANK. Keep in mind, however, that certain huge contributors like Critor and Levak are not active there anymore for the time being, that the new forums loads much slower and that it contains bugs, so if you got troubles posting there, you can also try the French Omnimaga section or yAronet.

Hopefully TI-BANK forum situation can be remedied soon so they can be active again in some ways or others.

UPDATE (June 4th): It appears there was an agreement between Critor and Mic and that Critor return as news editor and moderator will allow him to work on the forum system to fix the errors and convert all the old posts to the new system format. More info (in French) can be found here.

[ruler501]

At least they'll be able to get most of it back. Good luck to all on TI-BANK

[DJ Omnimaga]

I wonder if when the situation is solved they could convert all old posts and put them in the new board?  If it's not solved, then I'm curious what were the plans, though. Nonetheless I am glad the old posts are still available. I kinda wish this was the case of the old Omnimaga board... (only like 1000 or so are)

[ruler501]

I always say keep a backup of everything looks like TI-BANK tried to follow the advice at least. bad thngs can always happen at the worst times

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well it's not them that did it but a member from here, but I think someone on their site backed up recent posts the final day before the shut down, which is good.

[Munchor]

The backup seems great, thanks a lot Jim Bauwens

[Lionel Debroux]

Conversion from the presentation form (the HTML representation of the internal database) to the internal database form is difficult. There was no backup of the internal database format, as Forumactif doesn't give access to it, and tools that help freeing a forum from the Forumactif lockdown had not been run yet

[qazz42]

why did ti-bank close in the first place?

[ruler501]

mic had some problems. read the TI-BANK in danger thread

[DJ Omnimaga]

Actually Lionel it seems they're gonna do it. Not sure if the accounts and account infos will be kept, though. http://ti.bank.free.fr/index.php?mod=news&ac=commentaires&id=1151

[critor]

In all cases, the passwords and PMs are lost.


Forum accounts will probably be merged with the current CMS accounts.

If a matching account does not exist, a new password will be generated and mailed to the owner.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Right. I understand a bit about the password. A few years ago I found an Invisionfree/Forumotion to Simplemachines/PHPBB converter that simply screenscrapped the forum of your choice. You had to make every hidden forum public to guests, along with personal info, so you could convert everything, but passwords, due to encryption or something.

Just be careful while merging accounts, however, so you don't overwrite someone else's account with another. You could just rename duplicates, but then several people might end up with two accounts...

Also I think you got an advantage of using an old, unmaintainted CMS and fixing it: Most spambots won't be compatible with it, as bots became popular in 2006 and the last PwsPHP update was in 2004.

[Lionel Debroux]

A few years ago I found an Invisionfree/Forumotion to Simplemachines/PHPBB converter that simply screenscrapped the forum of your choice.

AFAIK, for TI-Bank, nobody had the time to run such a converter to completion

For one thing, I think that raising the integrated (PwsPHP) forum from its state of inflexibility, low "feature-ness", and coding insecurity, is a lost cause. It would be like trying to build a waterproof material using some wire netting as a starting point - that takes many many years, as witnessed by the loooong ongoing road of Windows 9x - NT - 2000 - XP - Vista - 7 towards more coding security

To me, the only sane solution, in the short-, mid- and long-term, is to scrap the PwsPHP forum, and to use one of the well-known forum systems. IMO, if it means using a separate forum with separate registration (keeping the situation of the past years on TI-Bank), by all means, so be it: a minor improvement of user convenience (a single account) is not, IMO, worth the pain using something well known to be sub-par (Forumactif / yAronet / Omnimaga / Cemetech / etc. users have grown accustomed to well-behaved, featureful forum software !), and equally well known to be full of holes.

In practice, a significant number of people who register on the forum don't register on the main site, or at least, don't seem to use much their account on the main site if they have one. Sure, they tend to fill in their calculator roster. However, for example, look at the low number of comments on news items - only about 1100, if a box at the right side of the main site is to be believed

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well, Jim did a good job grabbing all the pages, but it stops at May 13th and still needs converting. Also I checked Archive.org and TI-BANK definitively used the PwsPHP forum system. I bet they switched due to its problems. I definitively think a PhpBB install would be nice. However, the downside of using something else than the PwsPHP or Forumactif systems is that they'll have to monitor spambots.

Also even though TI-BANK required 2 accounts to use both site and forums, a lot of people still signed up on them anyway and it did not affect either sites. Also some people might just visit to ask help while others will do so to post their programs anyway.

That said, in the future, it would be nice to see account linking, though.

[Stefan Bauwens]

Its great to hear that Mic an Critor are working together again! Good luck to TI-BANK