In between the schmoozing and the umpteenth repetition of discussions about common equipment and materials and basic photographic technique, there are threads here that contain information - particularly about less common cameras, lenses and other equipment - that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. Yes, it's very "noisy" and requires some existing knowledge to effectively sort the wheat from the chaff. But so long as anyone is seriously pursuing large format photography, the information will be of practical value.
So far as I know, archiving discussion board content in a format that is not dependent on forum-software-living-on-top-of-database-software to enable reading is not straightforward. But I am not remotely a database expert and could be wrong about that. I will try to learn more.
fotofpw: I get it. My dad and I shared model trains. After he passed along, the fun was gone, the sparkle, the joy in it. I still love trains of all sizes all the way to full size, but not doing them myself anymore. Sold all of that off, gave away the rest. Understand 100%.
Now photography was something I always pushed along with on my own. Still do.
Look for something else. Spring comes. Sunshine, too.
This is a real problem in the long run. I've spent lots of time on other forums that eventually went kaput. It's all gone. Anyone remember Geocities? That's another huge data site that just went away overnight.
Even here, there's lots of dead links right from the main site. https://www.largeformatphotography.info/resources.html
That's the Resources page from the main site. Almost all of the links are long dead. Even with an active site like this there are many things that no longer work, and many that can never be recovered.
There is so much information now available through the internet, but that information is also extremely volatile. I don't have an answer to this problem, but from personal experience I do know that it could all disappear in the blink of an eye.
I don't know if the Mods or Rockers drink Patrón or not...
but John Lennon was "more of a Mocker, really..."
The first thing is to find out if the site is backed up on a second server regularly. I've been part of forums where the host went belly up and nobody had made a backup. Decades of knowledge, gone forever.
Individuals can also make functional (read-only) website copies with various software, some free. I copied the original forum at Greenspun when that started going tits up. You don't need to own a copy of vbulletin. One such software is HTTrack
Thanks, Wayne. Our technical gurus are well aware of proper backup discipline for day-to-day operational continuity. The general question of DIY crawlers for database-independent archiving had just come up in our internal discussion, but I wasn't aware of HTTrack - thanks very much, will follow up on that.
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