Nugget Shooter Forum Closing

[Mike Furness]

Yes I would definitely like to see a library for all the great pieces of info that forum has had over the years. 

[Steve Herschbach]

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc is where the eyeballs are these days. That said I’ve seen no real change in traffic here in the last three years, as far back as my report runs. Around 7000 views a day. Been up to double that when new detectors release but always settles back down around 7000-8000. The main thing that helped here is I saw that nugget hunting was dying out so branched out more. The XP Deus 2 and Minelab Manticore are big traffic drivers at the moment, along with the Nokta Legend. And hate to say it but as other forums die off a few of the people end up here so these is some consolidation going on in that regard. Bottom line is it’s a bit of work keeping these things running and for dealers in particular if they are not generating revenue than a waste of resources spent better elsewhere. Bills YouTube channel is probably bringing him more sales than his forum and that’s kind of the bottom line in business.

[mn90403]

I put a lot of content on Bill's forum over the years.  I knew as other forums left his would be too much to keep online.

This is really only my 3rd forum.  The first was Chris Gholson's.  I had lots of beach hunts, meteorites and nuggets on each of them.  I think I still have most of the pictures even after a couple of computer crashes but not the posts.

[Steve Herschbach]

Search the history of over 823 billion web pages on the Internet.

https://archive.org

[Clay Diggins]

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Search the history of over 823 billion web pages on the Internet.

https://archive.org

It doesn't really work that way for forum software Steve. The wayback machine archives webpages. Forum software rentals  like ipbhost (as opposed to webpage based forums) don't allow scraping of content. Try searching your own forum on wayback and you will see that individual posts are not archived. This hiding of content is a function of the forum hosting software and not the wayback machine.

Individual websites are archived but it's not as simple as it seems. A few years back I recreated Bill and Linda's website from wayback when they decided to take down their website. It took weeks of rewriting pages and searching for missing assets and that was a fairly simple website without javascript or php.

I imagine with an active forum software account you can download your forum content? I doubt it would be complete or usable to set up another forum but there might be enough there to set up a search system?

 

 

[GhostMiner]

Has the forum owner actually said the website is done?

[Steve Herschbach]

2 hours ago, Clay Diggins said:

It doesn't really work that way for forum software Steve. The wayback machine archives webpages. Forum software rentals  like ipbhost (as opposed to webpage based forums) don't allow scraping of content. Try searching your own forum on wayback and you will see that individual posts are not archived. This hiding of content is a function of the forum hosting software and not the wayback machine.

Individual websites are archived but it's not as simple as it seems. A few years back I recreated Bill and Linda's website from wayback when they decided to take down their website. It took weeks of rewriting pages and searching for missing assets and that was a fairly simple website without javascript or php.

I imagine with an active forum software account you can download your forum content? I doubt it would be complete or usable to set up another forum but there might be enough there to set up a search system?

Works what way? Did I say how it works? The quote was just lifted from their website is all. Actually it does work but it’s hit and miss Clay. I know a bit about computers also, it’s not like you cornered the market there. Different snapshots collect different posts so I’ve had to look hard to find some old stuff - I have used it a lot. But yeah, for database driven forums a lot of the content simply disappears and is lost. It depends on the software used and how it’s delivering the content. Whatever, it’s better than nothing, and that’s why I provided the link. There was no promise that it would deliver absolutely everything anyone wants by me. 

[Clay Diggins]

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Works what way? Did I say how it works? The quote was just lifted from their website is all.

My bad Steve. I assumed you were replying to dirtman and mn90403's posts bemoaning the loss of valuable content. I didn't realize the wayback post was unconnected.

 

[GotAU?]

If he’s done with it, perhaps someone could help Bill archive it?

[mn90403]

You know part of the problem has to be that Skip suffered the loss of his home and I imagine his computers.  He was doing the bulk of the administration as far back as I can remember.

Maybe the way to get it back up and running is to help Skip a bit more and then make arrangements with Bill to archive the data in some way.  It was using the same/similar format software as is used here.  I'm sure it is simpler said than done.