We gotta figure out some way to save the posts, threads, chats... whatever you call all that information on the old ALR... I search it all the time, active first, then the archive... it priceless!
Someone suggested copying to a CD or DVD and selling them.... I'll take serial #1.
To quote a venerable old gentleman, "I'm Paul Harvey and I've got news for you."
If the archives can't be transferred, they will be lost. It's a fool's folly. I know from personal experience, having changed servers thrice in the past 12 years. I also thought I would put mine on a CD.
Consider the arbitrary number of 3000 postings per month. That's 36000 postings per year times 10 years = 360,000 individual messages with an average of 8 lines per message = 2.88 million lines of text. All this would have to be extracted, edited, put into a readable format and burned to a CD which had search capabilities built into it. It would take a dedicated person several years to complete the task.
Pogo said, I have seen the enemy and he is us." If the me-too, thank-you's, and non-content and off-topic related postings were removed, the archives would probably shrink by more than 75% which would still be a monumental undertaking to achieve.
If they can't be transferred, then I think the only viable alternative is to lock the old site to new messages and subscribers and keep it alive as an online archival site that is linked off the new one.
