Thread Retention

Someone enquired recently: How long do threads stay available on this site? Will there ever be a situation where a thread is no longer accesible to be viewed?

As far as I know, it's like this:

 However, in practice, threads can disappear for a number of reasons. For instance:

Also, if chess.com disappeared, everything would go with it - as the people at ChessPark.com discovered recently. If there's a thread containing information that you don't want to lose, make sure you keep a copy.

Good advice, Art, thanks for that post

The method I use for saving a local copy of a thread is ...

1. Step through each page, right click, Save As.
2. You then have a choice of 2 formats: Web page, Complete or Web Page, HTML only. I always choose Web page, Complete.
3. I append the page number to the page e.g. Cheating - Chess.com01.htm, Cheating - Chess.com02.htm, etc.
4. The SAVE AS creates a directory (using the name you've specified) i.e. Cheating - Chess.com01.htm_files. This contains the formatted text (.HTM), pictures (mainly .GIFs + JPEGs), scripts, etc. It also creates an HTML page named Cheating - Chess.com01.htm etc.
5. You have to do this for every page.

what about the one with the games and diagrams ? 

 That doesn't seem to work too well. When you click on the saved puzzle, the link still points back to chess.com and it doesn't step through the puzzle.

Back to the drawing board!

The wholesale removal of content when an account closes is one of my bigget pet-peeves with these forums.  It's understandable that sometimes it's warranted and the ability to remove all of a user's with one click is necessary, but there are many, many more instances when an accounts closure simply shouldn't be accompanied by the removal of almost any trace that the user was ever here.  It undermines good threads with valuable contributions and it would be great if these two things were de-coupled.

The greatest chess photos thread is missing quite a few of its contributions due to members closing their accounts. I wish they could at least selectively restore those posts, but that's probably too much to hope for.

Some threads should be accorded 'National Treasure' status and locked against partial or complete deletion - though not against addition.

I don't think the forums are intended as an archival medium. The greatest chess photos thread is indeed quite cool. Perhaps it should be in Chessopedia.

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/greatest-chess-photos

Could we contact 'The Elders of the Internet' and arrange to have selected threads preserved for posterity?

This is very interesting.

One difficulty with trying to get the photos archived is establishing who owns the copyrights.

When The Doomsday Project was initiated in the mid 1980's (on the 900th anniversary of the original Doomsday Book), material (mainly text and photos) was collected from a million individuals and organisations (predominantly schools) and stored on a pair of videodisks. The technology quickly became obsolete but the even greater challenge was the legal requirement to contact all of the copyright owners before the material could be made available on a new medium such as CD-ROM.