Old style thread links

Having been really busy over the past couple of weeks I might
have missed some announcement, sorry ... but it looks like the
old IPB style links are no longer valid. This was one of my
major worries about the vBulletin switchover, but Danny et al
seemed to have added extra code to make the old
index.php?showtopic=NNNNN links redirect to the right threads
under the new scheme.
.
Now, the redirect appears to take me to some sort of archive
page with hundreds of unrelated links. For example,
http://priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=31545 was galaxee/DH's
expose' of the tank bladder, and now that and numerous other
links I have in my "linkfarm" as well as other postings are
invalid.
.
I'm willing to go fix all my web stuff to use the new format, but
how do I find the old threads?? And how can guest users see
the various pictures and such within, if you've now got that
locked down against them?
.
It feels like we're on the verge of losing a really valuable
resource that anyone on the net can see. Please tell me it
ain't so.
.
_H*

 

I really wouldn't mind getting some feedback on this, either to
tell me I'm doing something wrong, or an active interest in working
to update all those external and cross-linked posts that, without
the old thread numbers working, are ALL BROKEN. The current
state of things is like starting all over to build a referenceable
knowledge base, and that's far too much make-work for no
good reason. Why were the thread numbers lost/changed?
.
_H*

 

Try this link, that I've had on my external "linkfarm" for a
couple of years:
_ http://priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=10705
that should have gone directly to some of the original threads
about the Pittsburgh MPG marathon. Instead, I get a page with
200 nondescript "archive" links on it, which doesn't help in
the slightest since they seem to point all over hell and gone.
.
With a little digging I can find the old threads, but at this
point the one I tried pointing to might be 9387, 10132, or 10274.
So external links, of which there are many across multiple sites,
are broken.
.
What's more serious is the INTERNAL links that people post, pointing
newbies to old threads -- all of *those* are broken too, so rather
than good MPG hints or tire-buying advice they'll find some
useless political screed instead. WHY is nobody taking any
interest in this problem? We're having a serious knowledge-loss
issue here, and Priuschat's credibility risks heading straight
into the toilet unless this is FIXED. It's always been one of
the best resources on the net because the knowledge here pretty
much goes back to day one, but now it's entombed under tons of
mismatched-links wreckage.
.
How the hell did this happen, and what do we do to recover?
Danny??
.
_H*

 

Well, I've poked various mods a little harder, and nobody's sure
what's up, and Danny appears to be AWOL. In the meantime I've
managed to recover updated pointers to various threads I remember
as being permanently worthwhile, and have started dropping them
into my linkfarm.
.
If you know the new thread number, you don't need to know which
subforum it was in -- vBulletin can simply find them by their
unique number and redirect to the official URL of whatever it is now.
Thus, a thread can be retrieved as priuschat.com/forums/x/NNNNN-x.html
where XXXXX is the new thread number. The "x" parts can be any
string; vBulletin ignores those.
.
So far I've dredged up these, for example:
__ old _____ new _____ topic______________________
_ 22210 ___ 21501 ___ ECU/fob reprogrammability from scratch
_ 31545 ___ 30593 ___ gas tank bladder exposed
_ 30906 ___ 29957 ___ engine reseal pix
_ 29898 ___ 28970 ___ what services you really need
all from Galaxee, that I had kept pointers to in my own records.
But there are probably plenty of other "seminal" postings people
have made over the years, and maybe this is our opportunity to
really sit down and put together a "best of Priuschat" in
conjunction with figuring out where said "best-of" has actually
gone in the meantime. Contributions welcome, even if in the
form of vague hints about ballpark timeframe, who might have
posted it, topic, etc. That giant list of "archive" numbers you
see when you just go to "priuschat.com" is a somewhat useful
search tool, *IF* you know what you're looking for.
.
Now, all we have to do is make it so not-logged-in outside folks
can download the pictures.
.
_H*