Help needed! Adopt a link to the old ATU site today!

After the ATUI shipwreck, I posted many links here on ATUII to cached material from the old site without actually copying the material here. (Wise old owl Pinz has been copying old cached material here from the start). This was because I was under the impression that this material had a shelf-life of many months- allowing me to get around to the essential copying work as time and opportunity offered- but I've been noticing recently that such links are expiring at a much faster rate than I'd anticipated, viz expiring in weeks, rather than months. In short, I'm never going to catch up.

I could use some help here.

If you encounter a still current link to cached material from the old ATUI site, it would be a great help if you could copy the good posts onto the same thread. Omit the drivel. Picture images and youtube links need posting separately.

This will both perform an essential public service and boost your own post count to astronomical levels.

Cheers!

If I google the following:

site:acrosstheuniverse.forumotion.com "paintings and photography"

we get this

a lot of threads still can be saved (and this is only the paintings and photography section)

I'm making decent progress with the Paintings & Photography section.

I'm more concerned about Literature, Theatre/Performance, Off Topic etc.

eddie wrote:

This will boost your own post count to astronomical levels.

Cheers!

So that is why you do it.

Doc Watson wrote:
So that is why you do it.

If an Arts message board has no Arts content, it's not an Arts message board. That's why I do it.

As for why you post....only you can say.

eddie wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:
So that is why you do it.

If an Arts message board has no Arts content, it's not an Arts message board. That's why I do it.

As for why you post....only you can say.

I post because I enjoy it . I like to learn from others and every so often they may just learn something from me

Exactly.

Simulacrum wrote:Exactly.

If you want to preserve your own Orson Welles thread in the Cinema section, you might complete the work I've already started. I had to abandon the task because I don't know how to copy embedded film clips.

I haven't got the time to be honest. Thanks for the work that you've done.

Update:

Links to ATUI cached material in the Painting & Photography and Theatre/Performance sections have more or less been dealt with, but the cached material is expiring rapidly.

Some threads I've replicated from still-current links.
Some I've recreated from memory as best I could when I've found that the links have expired.
Some expired threads still need rebuilding work.
Some topics I've had to delete because I couldn't recall the content well enough to attempt a rebuild.

The Literature section is the next big task.

I'd appeal once more to anyone who finds a still-current link to copy the material onto the same thread. Thanks to felix, guacamayo and twoody for what they've done. The matter is now becoming urgent because of the rate of cache erosion.

Whatever you wish to keep you'd better grab it fast.

eddie wrote: Whatever you wish to keep you'd better grab it fast.

Not a truer word (or several) spoken.

You've done a great job, Eddie, and I'll try and catch a few more, if I can, before they expire.

EDIT: thanks are also due to pinhedz for rescuing or re-creating many a thread in the realms of science, blues, folk, classical etc etc etc!

Update II

I've just had to delete many threads from the Literature section because the links to cached material had expired. There was absolutely no point in preserving such threads- except as mere Topic headings. So they've gone.

Managed to save about half a dozen, though.

I wasn't expecting the cached material to expire so FAST.

Oh, well. What can be salvaged from ATUI has pretty much been salvaged. The rest has sunk without trace- a very good thing, in some cases.

Eddie's da man

... but I'm still waiting to know if no. 9 is a woman

felix wrote:EDIT: thanks are also due to pinhedz for rescuing or re-creating many a thread in the realms of science, blues, folk, classical etc etc etc!

Yep... pinhedz da man!
hehehe

Lacking the advanced IT skills of felix and Pinz, I've had no idea how to compress surviving ATUI posts on a particular thread into a single AATUII post, as both felix and PInz have done successfully.

Instead, I've had to fall back on my own primitive IT 'skills' and plod manually through every thread response and post them individually.

This has had the unexpected bonus of making me AATUII's most prolific poster by a country mile.

bam balam doo wrote:... but I'm still waiting to know if no. 9 is a woman

I genuinely don't know! The Guardian's VS Naipaul quiz (see Literature section) didn't supply the answers in that particular online edition of their Books page.

But I'll try to find out.

The Guardian's already made its point just by setting the quiz, though, hasn't it?

Naipaul's a tosser.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of Eddie , Felix and others I dare to ask what is the real point of restoring all these old threads. Some of them had run their course. If one was still active at the time of the old site's demise . interested people would have restarted the topic and if it has gone this long without being started off again is it essential.
I think Eddie and others have done an incredible job in restoring these old threads . But why ?

Doc Watson wrote:I think Eddie and others have done an incredible job in restoring these old threads . But why ?

What are you, some kind of vegetable?

eddie wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:I think Eddie and others have done an incredible job in restoring these old threads . But why ?

What are you, some kind of vegetable?

As I said it would incur your wrath , but you have not explained why.
"Leave the dead you've left behind , they will not follow you"

pinhedz wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:But why ?

To me, this site is an experiment. It's an investigation into whether or not a forum for just discussing music and the arts can get traction without some kind of cult figure (like Bob Dylan) at the center.

To get traction, new members have to find the place. How would they find the place? Probably by googling on key words or phrases--looking for the kind of content that interests them.

The old ATU had 80,000 posts with millions of words and phrases, and content ranging over many areas of music and the arts. So far, less than 1/10th of that content has been restored, but I think what's here now is a higher-grade ore.

That doesn't mean that the experiment is going to be any more successful than it was before (the membership is still almost entirely former ER members), but an experiment is an experiment.

If you type in all across the universe in google you are given this site.
As topics come up they are relevant.
Sites and forums come and go.

Doc Watson wrote:why ?

Pinhedz has expressed the 'why' as well as it can be expressed, I think.

I suppose you'd say 'a forum is a forum is a forum'? If this one goes, there's always another forum to have fun on and post our witty but inconsequential thoughts?

In which case, the value, beyond it's immediate fun potential, of any post/thread, is a passing thing, and not worth further consideration?

Perhaps we need an automatic function whereby any thread which has had no post added in, say, 10 or 20 or 30 days, self destructs?

Doc Watson wrote: As I said it would incur your wrath , but you have not explained why.
"Leave the dead you've left behind , they will not follow you"

Anger? No. Contempt? Yes.

The Dylan misquotation is entirely predictable and would not have occured if you've had an ATU "Dylan Lyrics" thread to which to refer.

But I was forgetting...you claim to have sold books- but do you actually have any in your house? Your opposition to public libraries- as set out in the Literature section- suggests that you don't.

It's almost certainly a mistake to make this post at all, to respond as if I were addressing a genuine poster. I've never accepted that the Emu/Watson persona is anything more than a satirical construct, a wind-up. I believe it was Nash who assigned your spider avatar? Smart woman, Nash.

Doc Watson wrote:At the risk of incurring the wrath of Eddie , Felix and others I dare to ask what is the real point of restoring all these old threads. Some of them had run their course. If one was still active at the time of the old site's demise . interested people would have restarted the topic and if it has gone this long without being started off again is it essential.
I think Eddie and others have done an incredible job in restoring these old threads . But why ?

I am really grateful to everone involved in collecting up our old threads, also to members for thinking up new ones.

You do not seem to contribute much at all, other than boring one liners.

I agree with Eddie and a number of others here, I don't think you are for real.

^^^^^
so others feel like this about emu also?