Michael Mutmansky
17-Oct-2003, 15:24
Everyone,
I have been thinking about this whole forum migration issue, and I a pleased that we finally have our own home. Since the migration to P-N last year, I think the level of discussion had dropped of considerably.
However, I am a bit concerned about the archives that are on this site, and the (possibly duplicate?) archives on that site. Imagine this scenario...
Five years from now, someone is looking for some information and recalls that they think they saw it on the LF forum, and attempts to do a general Google search to find it. In Google, up pops a bunch of seemingly identical threads, but the data is not to be found anywhere.
It turns out, the thread originated on the LF Forum, was migrated (forked?) to P-N, and then continued on with the discussions there with a different end result.
This sounds like a real problem for data mining in the years to come.
Is there any way that this problem can be avoided? I have thought about having my posts to the old LF Forum removed from the P-N archive to eliminate the possibility of a Google search showing two different locations for something I wrote. This issue is really independant from the whole commercial debate that is going on regarding P-N, but ultimately that issue makes it easy for me to decide which archive I would like to keep my contributions in.
I know that removing contributions from the archive at P-N will result in discontinuous discussions, but ultimately, I belive that if P-N wanted a LF forum, they should have created one on their own, rather than hijacking the independant LF Forum.
I respectfully request to hear what others on this forum think about this issue. While I know that this is ultimately an individual issue, I am willing to let the general feeling of the group sway my decision to pull my archives contribution. If this forked data is not percieved as any real problem, then I am inclined to let it remain, even though P-N is now actively using the archives for income generation.
---Michael
I have been thinking about this whole forum migration issue, and I a pleased that we finally have our own home. Since the migration to P-N last year, I think the level of discussion had dropped of considerably.
However, I am a bit concerned about the archives that are on this site, and the (possibly duplicate?) archives on that site. Imagine this scenario...
Five years from now, someone is looking for some information and recalls that they think they saw it on the LF forum, and attempts to do a general Google search to find it. In Google, up pops a bunch of seemingly identical threads, but the data is not to be found anywhere.
It turns out, the thread originated on the LF Forum, was migrated (forked?) to P-N, and then continued on with the discussions there with a different end result.
This sounds like a real problem for data mining in the years to come.
Is there any way that this problem can be avoided? I have thought about having my posts to the old LF Forum removed from the P-N archive to eliminate the possibility of a Google search showing two different locations for something I wrote. This issue is really independant from the whole commercial debate that is going on regarding P-N, but ultimately that issue makes it easy for me to decide which archive I would like to keep my contributions in.
I know that removing contributions from the archive at P-N will result in discontinuous discussions, but ultimately, I belive that if P-N wanted a LF forum, they should have created one on their own, rather than hijacking the independant LF Forum.
I respectfully request to hear what others on this forum think about this issue. While I know that this is ultimately an individual issue, I am willing to let the general feeling of the group sway my decision to pull my archives contribution. If this forked data is not percieved as any real problem, then I am inclined to let it remain, even though P-N is now actively using the archives for income generation.
---Michael