Preserving MusicXML forum at makemusic.com

[infojunkie]

As per @lemzwerg's excellent sleuthing, the Wayback Machine has archived part of the forum - including the very last post before the forum went offline.

Here's a good link to start navigating: https://web.archive.org/web/20210616073715/https://forums.makemusic.com/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=29af39e1d09ae68e9fdc2a318270354d

However, you will notice that starting at page 11, the Wayback Machine has no archive of the pages.

Going backward from page 65, it seems the archive stops at page 61.

Since Wayback Machine works by taking multiple snapshots of given pages at different times (over multiple years), it may be possible to reconstitute part of the missing inner pages (pp. 11-60) by examining different captures and checking the thread numbers (the t= argument in the URL of each post).

The idea would be to create a web page with links to the various Wayback Machine captures, that together reconstitute whatever can be salvaged from this forum.

[infojunkie]

Unless @mdgood can find the full forum archive for us - I'd be willing to convert it to a static read-only HTML version.

[mscuthbert]

I think Michael already tried (ca. 2020) and could not find it -- it would be great to have a backup of Wayback's backup.

[infojunkie]

I am currently trying out commercial service https://www.waybackmachinedownloader.com/en/ which is giving me good results. the output will be HTML / CSS / JS files that are extracted from Wayback Machine and can be served as static files. @mscuthbert what would you advise to re-publish them somewhere online? Part of this repo? Another W3C repo? A separate, unaffiliated repo?

[mscuthbert]

My suggestion would be that if it's under about 100MB to put it into this repo -- it is not cloned fully too often so the extra space shouldn't be a big problem for people wanting to implement MusicXML. If it's larger than that, then you can request a new Repo from W3C -- though all new community group repos are at w3c-wg/ now (the MNX/MusicXML Doc Generator is hosted there.)

Thanks for taking this on!

[infojunkie]

An update here: Wayback Machine Downloader has been churning for 2 days on the forum archive and is at 12.13% as of now 😆 Looks like we're in for a long wait!

[infojunkie]

The Wayback Machine Downloader completed today! Here's a work repo: https://codeberg.org/infojunkie/makemusic-musicxml

Some initial comments:

• Lots of pages are duplicated because neither Wayback Machine nor the downloader understand the concept of pagination.
• Lots of posts are missing

I welcome interested members of the community to collaborate on the next step of restoration. I think we want to do the following:

• Deduplicate pages
• Remove or recreate broken functionality
• Connect to Codeberg pages / git-pages
• Comb through issues in this present repo to identify forum links and replace them with the above

[mdgood]

Thanks for your work on this! Just a note that I tried to update all the issues to replace forum links with links directly to the Wayback Machine backup when they were available. Of course I could have missed some.

Is there any interest in restoring older communications from the Recordare era, either from the original Yahoo! list or the mailing list that preceded the forum? I might have archives of those here, but no guarantees. This would be all 2001-2011 material. So I don't know if it would be very useful, unlike the more recent forum discussions. The mailing list archives were imported into the forum when that opened, but the really old Yahoo stuff never was.

[infojunkie]

I'm happy to open another restoration project, but we will need to find the source materials somewhere and also the willing members of the community to undertake the work. I'm personally interested in software archaeology (as a footnote, I spent a year at Internet Archive myself).

[infojunkie]

But just to reiterate, the MakeMusic MusicXML forum still needs significant work before it can be properly navigated.