Regarding Crockpotandgravel

[editor]

I don't ordinarily post publicly about individual users, but I don't want people to wonder what's going on and not have information.

 

A couple of days ago, Crockpotandgravel was banned.  Actually, he was flagged as a spammer.  I'm not sure why this happened, but I'm looking into it.

 

The reason I mention it here is that he was a prolific poster, and being marked a spammer caused the system to remove all of his posts.  As you can imagine, with 7,000+ posts to his name, this is causing some continuity issues in various threads.

 

I've reversed the ban, and am trying to figure out a way to recover his content.

[Tumbleweed_Tx]

sounds like the system needs to have a human approve any actions the system may want to take against someone.

[HNathoo]

That's very unfortunate. That member was a huge contributor to this forum and went above and beyond to provide very organized information, including timelines and archived links.

[editor]

5 hours ago, Tumbleweed_Tx said:

sounds like the system needs to have a human approve any actions the system may want to take against someone.

 

The problem is that the system didn't mark him a spammer automatically, a human did.  So therein lies the problem.

 

I put a trouble ticket in with the company that makes the HAIF software and was told that once a message is marked spam, it's gone forever.  This is unfortunate, but there's nothing much that can be done about it now.  

 

I have e-mailed Urbannizer and explained the situation.  I told him he is welcome to continue posting on HAIF, but if he doesn't want to, I understand that.

[rechlin]

Are there backups where the removed posts can be restored from?

[Luminare]

45 minutes ago, editor said:

 

The problem is that the system didn't mark him a spammer automatically, a human did.  So therein lies the problem.

 

I put a trouble ticket in with the company that makes the HAIF software and was told that once a message is marked spam, it's gone forever.  This is unfortunate, but there's nothing much that can be done about it now.  

 

I have e-mailed Urbannizer and explained the situation.  I told him he is welcome to continue posting on HAIF, but if he doesn't want to, I understand that.

 

I appreciate you going out of your way to look into this.

 

What will be evident early on with this isn't areas like "Going Up", but in the subforum neighborhood forums. Some projects are probably completely removed now that were small projects that he dedicated time to post about. I'll need to go thru my development map and see what was affected, but I'm sure those projects in neighborhood forums will be the biggest hit in all this.

[Triton]

7 hours ago, editor said:

 

The problem is that the system didn't mark him a spammer automatically, a human did.  So therein lies the problem.

 

I put a trouble ticket in with the company that makes the HAIF software and was told that once a message is marked spam, it's gone forever.  This is unfortunate, but there's nothing much that can be done about it now.  

 

I have e-mailed Urbannizer and explained the situation.  I told him he is welcome to continue posting on HAIF, but if he doesn't want to, I understand that.

I think you mean Crockpot.

[mattyt36]

What a shame.

[CrockpotandGravel]

Thanks, @editor for reinstating my account and your transparency. I appreciate it all and your tireless efforts to retrieve removed contents. 

It's unfortunate this happened (be it maliciously or accidental). Not only were posts, renderings, excerpts from articles behind hard paywalls, archived links (to websites, pages, and PDF's  no longer on the web) removed, but other member's comments, contributions, and their photos were removed (in the many threads I created). All of which were helpful and informative to anyone who came across the threads (more so visitors and the local media who use what's posted here).

I'll try to repost what I can when I can, but nearly everything is gone.

I hope that if something like this happens in the future, be it to someone who's banned or marked as a spammer (accidentally or otherwise), there  will be a system in place to keep their content on the board. 

Thanks again to editor's efforts and  all the comments of support. Glad to be back!

[CrockpotandGravel]

On 10/11/2019 at 4:22 PM, rechlin said:

Are there backups where the removed posts can be restored from?

Unfortunately, no. 

[rechlin]

4 hours ago, CrockpotandGravel said:

On 10/11/2019 at 4:22 PM, rechlin said:

Are there backups where the removed posts can be restored from?

Unfortunately, no. 

 

That is absolutely astonishing, and, quite frankly, completely unacceptable.  If the administrators of this site are so incompetent that they can't even be bothered to occasionally make a backup of the site, we should not be wasting our time commenting on it.  Computers crash or get hacked all the time, or things get wiped out by human error (as appears to have happened here), and it would be a travesty if that were all lost because of stupidity. We should start a new site that is actually backed up, rather than relying on irresponsible administrators.

Perhaps the site admins should make a complete copy of the site available as a torrent that we can all download, to distribute the backup around the world, so in a worst case scenario someone else could bring it online again. That's what I do with my most important (tens of thousands of unique visitors per week) web site -- if I get hit by a bus, I don't want all that user-created content to vanish.

 

In the meantime, someone should volunteer (preferably the administrator responsible for wiping out your content) to go through archive.org to find all posts by you that were archived there, and manually load them back into the forum with the right dates and everything.

 

This whole thing is making me reconsider participating on this forum, unless the administrators can apologize and explain the actions they are taking to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.  Back in the days of Usenet we never had this problem, but now with forums being centralized under individual control it makes us realize how much better things were in the 80s and 90s.

[HNathoo]

6 hours ago, CrockpotandGravel said:

Thanks, @editor for reinstating my account and your transparency. I appreciate it all and your tireless efforts to retrieve removed contents. 

It's unfortunate this happened (be it maliciously or accidental). Not only were posts, renderings, excerpts from articles behind hard paywalls, archived links (to websites, pages, and PDF's  no longer on the web) removed, but other member's comments, contributions, and their photos were removed (in the many threads I created). All of which were helpful and informative to anyone who came across the threads (more so visitors and the local media who use what's posted here).

I'll try to repost what I can when I can, but nearly everything is gone.

I hope that if something like this happens in the future, be it to someone who's banned or marked as a spammer (accidentally or otherwise), there  will be a system in place to keep their content on the board. 

Thanks again to editor's efforts and  all the comments of support. Glad to be back!

glad to have you back! 

[mkultra25]

10 hours ago, rechlin said:

 

That is absolutely astonishing, and, quite frankly, completely unacceptable.  If the administrators of this site are so incompetent that they can't even be bothered to occasionally make a backup of the site, we should not be wasting our time commenting on it.  Computers crash or get hacked all the time, or things get wiped out by human error (as appears to have happened here), and it would be a travesty if that were all lost because of stupidity. We should start a new site that is actually backed up, rather than relying on irresponsible administrators.

Perhaps the site admins should make a complete copy of the site available as a torrent that we can all download, to distribute the backup around the world, so in a worst case scenario someone else could bring it online again. That's what I do with my most important (tens of thousands of unique visitors per week) web site -- if I get hit by a bus, I don't want all that user-created content to vanish.

 

In the meantime, someone should volunteer (preferably the administrator responsible for wiping out your content) to go through archive.org to find all posts by you that were archived there, and manually load them back into the forum with the right dates and everything.

 

This whole thing is making me reconsider participating on this forum, unless the administrators can apologize and explain the actions they are taking to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.  Back in the days of Usenet we never had this problem, but now with forums being centralized under individual control it makes us realize how much better things were in the 80s and 90s.

 

You're assuming a lot. If, as you speculate, the site really isn't being backed up at all on a regular basis, then I'd share your surprise. But the question as originally posed didn't say "do backups exist?" but rather "do backups exist that removed posts can be restored from?" The difference is subtle but important. 

 

It's entirely possible that backups do exist, but that restores from backups are limited to complete restores - IOW, selective restores of certain posts wouldn't be possible, and once a complete restore from a particular backup is performed, all content posted after the point in time that the backup was pulled is overwritten. 

 

I'm also not sure things were so much better in the 80s and 90s, and I say that as someone who has been a Usenet junkie for close to 30 years. Some things were indeed better, but some were definitely worse. 

[CrockpotandGravel]

On 10/19/2019 at 10:18 AM, rechlin said:

 

That is absolutely astonishing, and, quite frankly, completely unacceptable.  If the administrators of this site are so incompetent that they can't even be bothered to occasionally make a backup of the site, we should not be wasting our time commenting on it.  Computers crash or get hacked all the time, or things get wiped out by human error (as appears to have happened here), and it would be a travesty if that were all lost because of stupidity. We should start a new site that is actually backed up, rather than relying on irresponsible administrators.

Perhaps the site admins should make a complete copy of the site available as a torrent that we can all download, to distribute the backup around the world, so in a worst case scenario someone else could bring it online again. That's what I do with my most important (tens of thousands of unique visitors per week) web site -- if I get hit by a bus, I don't want all that user-created content to vanish.

 

In the meantime, someone should volunteer (preferably the administrator responsible for wiping out your content) to go through archive.org to find all posts by you that were archived there, and manually load them back into the forum with the right dates and everything.

 

This whole thing is making me reconsider participating on this forum, unless the administrators can apologize and explain the actions they are taking to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.  Back in the days of Usenet we never had this problem, but now with forums being centralized under individual control it makes us realize how much better things were in the 80s and 90s.

I don't know the ins and outs of the software used for the forum, but there is probably some kind of setting that could prevent something like this going forward.


It's unfortunate this happened (and worse that the mod responsible hasn't apologized  whether the action taken was in error or otherwise), but it happened. I'll post what I can if I have pages saved. 

From now on, I'll just have to create archive links of everything on my profile page, I guess.  Actually, I was beginning to do that for threads in Going Up. It was a way to preserve mostly photos  posters hotlink from websites (which when pulled from the host site, no longer shows on the forum).  But then this happened.

 

C'est la vie. 





Mods, feel free to close this thread if you want.

 

[DrLan34]

On 10/19/2019 at 4:53 AM, CrockpotandGravel said:

Thanks, @editor for reinstating my account and your transparency. I appreciate it all and your tireless efforts to retrieve removed contents. 

It's unfortunate this happened (be it maliciously or accidental). Not only were posts, renderings, excerpts from articles behind hard paywalls, archived links (to websites, pages, and PDF's  no longer on the web) removed, but other member's comments, contributions, and their photos were removed (in the many threads I created). All of which were helpful and informative to anyone who came across the threads (more so visitors and the local media who use what's posted here).

I'll try to repost what I can when I can, but nearly everything is gone.

I hope that if something like this happens in the future, be it to someone who's banned or marked as a spammer (accidentally or otherwise), there  will be a system in place to keep their content on the board. 

Thanks again to editor's efforts and  all the comments of support. Glad to be back!

 

Glad to have you back and I'm sorry this happened.

[Ross]

9 hours ago, CrockpotandGravel said:

I don't know the ins and outs of the software used for the forum, but there is probably some kind of setting that could prevent something like this going forward.


It's unfortunate this happened (and worse that the mod responsible hasn't apologized  whether the action taken was in error or otherwise), but it happened. I'll post what I can if I have pages saved. 

From now on, I'll just have to create archive links of everything on my profile page, I guess.  Actually, I was beginning to do that for threads in Going Up. It was a way to preserve mostly photos  posters hotlink from websites (which when pulled from the host site, no longer shows on the forum).  But then this happened.



 

 

From an Invision forum:

Years later... this appears to still be a problem.

 

If you flag a member as a spammer then unflag them you can go into the modcp and restore their TOPICS under restore content but their POSTS appear to be gone forever.

 

Another post says there's a way to restore deleted content from the moderator's control panel, but doesn't say how to achieve that.

 

Since the forums are free, we may just have to put up with the occasional blip like this, where unintended consequences of an action aren't known until after the fact. On other Invision forums I've participated in, all the users got wiped  through a database issue, or by a hacker, and we all had to sign up again.

[cspwal]

On 10/21/2019 at 8:48 AM, CrockpotandGravel said:

I don't know the ins and outs of the software used for the forum, but there is probably some kind of setting that could prevent something like this going forward.


It's unfortunate this happened (and worse that the mod responsible hasn't apologized  whether the action taken was in error or otherwise), but it happened. I'll post what I can if I have pages saved. 

From now on, I'll just have to create archive links of everything on my profile page, I guess.  Actually, I was beginning to do that for threads in Going Up. It was a way to preserve mostly photos  posters hotlink from websites (which when pulled from the host site, no longer shows on the forum).  But then this happened.

 

C'est la vie. 





Mods, feel free to close this thread if you want.

 

 

Glad to have you back, and you sure are putting in a lot of work to try restore all the lost threads

[editor]

On 10/19/2019 at 8:18 AM, rechlin said:

 

That is absolutely astonishing, and, quite frankly, completely unacceptable.  If the administrators of this site are so incompetent that they can't even be bothered to occasionally make a backup of the site, we should not be wasting our time commenting on it.  Computers crash or get hacked all the time, or things get wiped out by human error (as appears to have happened here), and it would be a travesty if that were all lost because of stupidity. We should start a new site that is actually backed up, rather than relying on irresponsible administrators.

 

Crockpot is incorrect.  There are backups of the forum.  Do not assume Crockpot is correct in stating that there aren't.  He is not an administrator and has no knowledge of how the forum works.

 

Also, hyperbole like "unacceptable" and "incompetent" is neither helpful, nor welcome.  

 

On 10/19/2019 at 8:18 AM, rechlin said:

Back in the days of Usenet we never had this problem, but now with forums being centralized under individual control it makes us realize how much better things were in the 80s and 90s.

 

I was very active in Usenet days.  Usenet was resilient because it was a network of hundreds of thousands of computers each copying each other's content.  HAIF is one server, not hundreds of thousands of servers.

On 10/19/2019 at 3:47 AM, CrockpotandGravel said:

Unfortunately, no. 

 

This is incorrect.  Also you have no knowledge of the workings of HAIF and should refrain from posting as if you do.

On 10/21/2019 at 6:48 AM, CrockpotandGravel said:

I don't know the ins and outs of the software used for the forum, but there is probably some kind of setting that could prevent something like this going forward.

 

There is not.  I contacted the company which makes the software, and this is not an option.

 

 

[editor]

On 10/19/2019 at 7:11 PM, mkultra25 said:

 

You're assuming a lot. If, as you speculate, the site really isn't being backed up at all on a regular basis, then I'd share your surprise. But the question as originally posed didn't say "do backups exist?" but rather "do backups exist that removed posts can be restored from?" The difference is subtle but important. 

 

It's entirely possible that backups do exist, but that restores from backups are limited to complete restores - IOW, selective restores of certain posts wouldn't be possible, and once a complete restore from a particular backup is performed, all content posted after the point in time that the backup was pulled is overwritten. 

 

I'm also not sure things were so much better in the 80s and 90s, and I say that as someone who has been a Usenet junkie for close to 30 years. Some things were indeed better, but some were definitely worse. 

 

 

You are correct — The problem isn't that the forum couldn't have been rolled back to restore all of Crockpot's posts.  The problem is that if that was done, it would have removed all of the posts made by people after his were removed.

 

So restoring the posts of one person would have deleted the posts of hundreds of other people.  It was an easy choice.

[rechlin]

53 minutes ago, editor said:

The problem isn't that the forum couldn't have been rolled back to restore all of Crockpot's posts.  The problem is that if that was done, it would have removed all of the posts made by people after his were removed.

 

The right way to do this would be to extract his posts from the backup and reload them into the forum.  I've not worked with the Invision forum software before so I can't give steps on how to do this in your case, but I've done this with other forum software.  Since it uses MySQL it's just a matter of writing the right queries, and it can be pretty much automatic regardless of the number of posts (loading the backup into a temporary database, copying the posts to the current database, and updating any pointers).  Tedious?  Perhaps.  But if I had a mistake like what happened here on a forum I ran, you bet I'd be doing it, especially when it was someone who had contributed so much.

 

I am glad you do have backups and I apologize for taking comments made by someone without knowledge of the system at face value and unfairly disparaging you as a result.

[danielsonr]

2 hours ago, rechlin said:

 

The right way to do this would be to extract his posts from the backup and reload them into the forum.  I've not worked with the Invision forum software before so I can't give steps on how to do this in your case, but I've done this with other forum software.  Since it uses MySQL it's just a matter of writing the right queries, and it can be pretty much automatic regardless of the number of posts (loading the backup into a temporary database, copying the posts to the current database, and updating any pointers).  Tedious?  Perhaps.  But if I had a mistake like what happened here on a forum I ran, you bet I'd be doing it, especially when it was someone who had contributed so much.

 

I am glad you do have backups and I apologize for taking comments made by someone without knowledge of the system at face value and unfairly disparaging you as a result.

Or just get over it and move on. This is not the National Archives. It is a free forum where a few people have graciously volunteered as administrators in their spare time without pay. Maybe I’m wrong, but I would guess that the vast majority of members on this forum don’t care if thousands of posts from previous years are restored or not.

[samagon]

23 hours ago, editor said:

 

I was very active in Usenet days.  Usenet was resilient because it was a network of hundreds of thousands of computers each copying each other's content.  HAIF is one server, not hundreds of thousands of servers.

 

 

oh man. newsgroups. I spent more time on newsgroups than I did on the internet back then. but I guess that was a thing. before altavista, and then google, there was no real way to find things on the internet, however, the list of newsgroup sites that you could access was pretty descriptive. kind of an interesting full circle kind of thing, but reddit seems to be pretty popular and has all the trappings of these old communication methods we used to use. then again, we don't use them any longer for a good reason I suspect.

[LBC2HTX]

Nothing to see here.. if you enjoyed the spamming, well, it's resumed without much delay. 

[CrockpotandGravel]

1 hour ago, LBC2HTX said:

Nothing to see here.. if you enjoyed the spamming, well, it's resumed without much delay. 

And how did I spam the forum?

99.1% of the content I posted was relevant.

I posted:

- New threads for projects or properties

(most came from Loopnet listings (which eventually were lots that were redeveloped or in the process of being redeveloped in some way), others from blurbs from Houston Chronicle's real estate transactions round up, from LLCs or properties I had  some inside knowledge of) (no different than anyone else here)

-  content about new projects that had not been shared to the forum (no different than anyone else here)

- renderings I came across or extracted from PDFs shared here that weren't posts. And when I did extract renderings and other related content from PDF that others shared but didn't post that content, I did it (and made an archive link) so that it would be visible to those who didn't want to download it or  were viewing the site from their tablet or mobile, making it easier for them) (no different than anyone else here)

-  I posted articles that contained new information to developments and properties on the forum. (no different than anyone else here and no different than you, although unlike you, I don't post the same article with the same press release details that has already been posted)

- And I commented and responded to posts in the forum (no different than anyone else here)



So what's your deal?

I've been apart of this forum since 2013. And before that, I was a longtime lurker since the mid' 2000's. I became active in either 2015 or 2016. And since then, contributed a lot to the forum, much of the same content Urbannizer shares (though Urb doesn't  resize images, or extract images from PDF files, or any of the extra I stuff I do to be of help to others). So again, no different than anyone else here.

And editor said I could repost what was lost (renderings, comments, etc), which was a lot in the neighborhood forums, a forum I had a big hand in keeping active. If you have a problem with that, take it up with editor.

Most of the content I shared is no longer on this forum. That also includes other member's helpful and insightful comments, photos, and other contributions. I'm doing my best to restore what I can so that like with all other posts in this forum, they can be referenced to see how a project has progressed, past plans, so past content is searchable on the forum and Google, and etc. I'm trying to reup those threads and comments made me and others early in the morning so as not to disrupt the flow of the thread during the day. But since I have free time today, I'm doing as much as I can before the rest of my content is not visible through Google Cache (at least those I wasn't able to save or archive to repost for later). But you have a problem with that. 

I don't like that the mod responsible for this mess removed years of content  from me and content shared by others in the threads started by me. These were threads and comments linked in Houston Chronicle articles, CultureMap, Houston Business Journal, Eater Houston, and linked in Facebook groups and Nextdoor. I don't like that the mod responsible isn't lending a hand by reposting some of the content they removed in the mass deletion of my account. I also don't like taking out time to repost loads of content previously shared here. But again, I'm doing it for the reasons I posted in the paragraph above. I'm being selfless and helpful. But you have a problem with that.

If you have such a problem with me reposting all the threads I started and the relevant posts in them or posts I contributed to this forum that are no longer here, take it up with the mod responsible for deleting and banning my account supposedly in "error" which they have yet to reach out to me privately to apologize for.

 

Or better yet, block me and you don't have to see anything I post, comment or otherwise on the forum.

 

 

[Subdude]

Before this thread leads to violence, closed.