new thread
I just noticed that every, single historical post made on this site new appears to be available, from 1997 onwards. I’m not sure whether this is a new feature, or something that I simply missed earlier, but there is a “go to date” on the left, and one can enter a year and month there to zero in on a time, and read posts there from around that date and backwards. It works, since I have already explored a few posts from ages ago. Not all photos still exist, because some may have been linked to old sites like PhotoBucket, but single photos still seem to be present for at least some posts. Also, for really old posts, some photos are marked as “purged”, but that’s understandable, since these are mostly posts 20 or more years ago.
Thank you, Jesus, for adding this feature, and good to know that all these old posts from the archives were saved are are there for the viewing.
David
Hi David,
Thanks for posting this as I didn't even notice that link until you mentioned it.Just for fun I selected January !, 1998 and scrolled through several posts from that time and noted a user with the name “Webmaster” which turned out to be Victor Engel, the founder of the mlhh. I only knew it was him due to the fact in one of his posts had a “e mail me” executable link in the body of the message.I clicked on it and sure enough an e mail with his name popped up.Kind of wonder if that's still a good e mail as I was tempted to write a short note to him.Actually If I wanted he's on my Facebook feed so I know he's still around.I'm going to have to explore more of these posts from the past as I knew about the mlhh before Bill Chossier took it over.Thank you David for starting this thread to let the members know it exists.Cheers
Mârk aka Hairball
Hi Mark,
I was pleasantly surprised to see the “go to date” function this morning, and I have no idea when that was added. We have to thank Jesus for this, and the fact that so much history was saved. I used to post a lot of my earlier photos linking to a site called PhotoBucket, which many guys who posted multiple photos used to use, but PhotoBucket more or less shut down, so all those photos were lost. However, single photos posted directly to the MLHH by other members did survive, at least after a certain date.
David
Hi David,
I can see myself spending hours sifting through posts starting back in the earliest days of the hyperboard.That's where I'm seeing post by Victor Engel, who originally launched the mlhh, back in the late 1990s.The e mail link I found embedded in one of his messages that I wrote to earlier got kicked back as undeliverable.Certainly understandable since the address is like 30 years old.I will message him on Facebook since I know I can find him there.Cool though as I found an image of the original mlhh homepage which is very basic.Also came across Victor's welcome message after the board went live.So cool!
Mârk aka Hairball
This is awesome :) Thanks for sharing this!
Hi David,
I added this functionality about one month ago.
You can see all messages from the beginning of the MLHH expect years 2004 - 2006 which wasn't present on the old site. I did a huge work to put 100% of the messages and images into the new website.
On the old server, each message or thread was a HTML file and there was several ZIP files that contains backups of these files and uploaded images on the board. I extracted all these ZIP files and ended with about 900,000 files! Yes, near one million files! Most of them was duplicates and first, I have to eliminate them with a comparison software (https://winmerge.org/) to find identical ones. After that there was still files with the same name and I had to compare them to find the most recent file.
The final step was to put all these posts into a database. I wrote a program to parse these files and again some issues with malformed HTML on some files that I need to manually repair.
It took me several weeks to process all this stuff and be sure to not loosing anything. This site is an incredible resource for long hair guys, it doesn't exists another resource like this one.
Images before 2006 doesn't exists anymore and like you wrote it, they were purged. In the 90s, hard drives were small and web hosting didn't offer lot of space, you have to manage disk space. Today it's not a problem with huge hard drives and images are smaller thanks to new codecs. Images are compressed with the today's best codec AVIF instead of JPEG, you have smaller files for the same quality.
I also fix all the MLHH internal links 404 error (= page not found); an internal link is a link that points himself to the current website. Now when you browse on the website 100% of internal links are functional.
I'm still working on improving the site but it's less visible because I'm working on things like improving performance to have fast loading pages and fixing some bugs.
You've done great work on the site, Jesus. Thank you for all your work to keep this site up and running and now better than ever!!
Philip
Thank you
Hi Jesus,
What a wonderful job you have done, and this is an outstanding resource for all of us. I’m sure I’ll be spending countless hours just reading some of these old posts, especially the oldest ones, from before I joined the site in late 2006.
A tip of the hat to you for the countless hours you have spent improving and updating our site, and I hope that we can persuade more guys to join and post here.
David
