>>SUSPENDED<< Prune v2018

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TheLoveBandit

Indefinite break from BL - contact other admin
Joined
Feb 22, 2000
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Edit: Click here to jump to the explanation of suspending this exercise

>>>*** SUSPENDED AS OF 28SEP *** <<<



WTH is this all about??!!?!


PRUNE [proon] verb (used with object), pruned, pruning.- to rid or clear of (anything superfluous or undesirable).


The site last ran a prune over 5 years ago, meaning we have over FIVE years of awesome posts full of discussion, insight, and solid HR work....hidden beneath OVER FIVE YEARS of crap. Don't believe us, just look at the size of the db:

NSFW:

Code:
The Old Lounge	675502
Other Drugs	454618
Psychedelic Drugs	321097
Basic Drug Discussion	308449
European & African Drug Discussion	191823
MDMA & Empathogenic Drugs	180261
Sex, Love and Relationships	166232
The Lounge	137702
The Dark Side	128651
Current Events and Politics	124232
Drug Culture	124072
Drugs in the Media	123932
Australia & Asia Drug Discussion	120477
Cannabis Discussion	104049
New Member Introductions	79832
Neuroscience and Pharmacology Discussion	68141
Philosophy and Spirituality	58630
Sober Living	54878
North & South America Drug Discussion	50729
Healthy Living	48800
Trip Reports	48514
Film & Television	43636
Life Advice & Visual Arts	40269
Non-Electronic Music Discussion	38750
Performance Enhancing Drugs	34170
Words	33292
Sports & Gaming	31081
Electronic Music Discussion	24996
Pillreports Discussion	20545
Site Technical Help	19688
Mental Health	19610
Science & Technology	17356
Education & Careers	9847
Pillreports Staff Discussion	8773
Bluelight Shrine	8119
Archive - Australian Drug Discussion	7588
Pill Testing Q&A	7129
Best of Bluelight	4851
Homeless Threads	3392
Anonymous Posting	3166
Testing Grounds	2636
Drug Studies	2409
Wiki	2275
Australian Pill Info Requests	2199
Roll Call	1857
Completed Studies	1785
Support Archive	1543
Archive - Australian Social	1353
Psychedelic Harm Reduction	1310
Vaping Discussion	1052
Global HR Workshop	949
Announcements	947
Clinical Psychedelic Research & Medicine	721
Cannabis Vaping Discussion	696
MAPS Discussion	507
Reference Materials	200
NMI break-room	177
Drug FAQs	54
Mephedrone Research	44
Harm Reduction	29
New Moderator Candidate Discussion	24
Healthy Living Directory	6
Trip Reports Batch Tagging Pool	2
Drug Testing Q&A	1

We will put up notices into each forum in the coming weeks to let the regulars know that we will be pruning out all threads prior to 2018. We'll try to give you members, and the mods a few (2?) weeks to realize this and try to save any valuable threads before they get lost in the cleaning frenzy. Either REPORT such valuable threads, or PM a mod with a link, or even reply to the thread to bring it back into the living - any of these methods can raise the attention of the mods to the 'valuable' thread and they can then decide to archive it or not (it remains at their discretion, and no, they don't have to save your special thread if it really doesn't warrant it).

The outcome of this is two fold. First, this should speed the server up a bit to not have to manage such a large database of dead threads. Secondly the search function will go quicker and not come back with those other ton'o'hits that are useless today :)

All forums are now put on notice for the impending PRUNE across the entire site. Contact your local mods with threads worth saving. For those wondering, we do not expect this to drop your post count and we're trying to ensure that's how it all goes down. However, if post counts do drop, we're sure you'll build them right back up ;) If your post count then gets dropped below 50, you will NOT get pushed back down into the GLer usergroup. Once you are a BLer, you will remain a Bler.


Frequent question - will post counts drop? We're taking every step to ensure this is not going to happen.

Frequent question - what about the archives? That's where the good stuff is intended to be saved from regular pruning (provided such a thread isn't simply kicked back into active discussion). So, anything in an archive is accepted as having been reviewed AND saved already, the archives will not be subject to the pruning process.

Frequent screaming whine - 2 freaking weeks? Are you kidding me? Well, no, we're not kidding but 2 weeks is a bit unrealistic (ya think, TLB? 8) ). 2 Weeks is not a hard deadline, and we're working with the mods on how to best handle each forum on a case-by-case basis but overall the entire site will be reviewed in an effort to trim the fat. This may take several weeks, possibly a month or more, for some of the heavier trafficked forums or those who have not seen a prune in 5+ years (thereby inheriting a LOT of stuff to review before we clean house).

Frequent question - will this resolve the cloudflare issues? No. But we're also looking into that as well. It's a bigger problem that will take longer to address.

Frequent question - Is it true the admin hoard Midget Pr0n? :| No comment.
 
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In an effort to keep the public more up to date with our progress, we are providing the following dashboard:


BLUELIGHT FEEDBACK -

* Wiki -
* Global HR -
* Announcements - Exempt
* Site Technical Help -


BLUELIGHT BASICS -

* New Member Introductions -
* Homeless - DONE
* Anonymous Posting - DONE
* Testing Grounds - DONE


Pillreports.net FORUMS - Exempt


FOCUS FORUMS

* Drug FAQs - Exempt
* MDMA & Empathogenic Drugs - SUSPENDED
* Cannabis Discussion -
* Performance Enhancing Drugs -
* Psychedelic Drugs - SUSPENDED
* Other Drugs - SUSPENDED


DRUG DISCUSSION

* Mephedrone Research - DONE
* Drug Studies -
* Drugs in the Media - SUSPENDED
* Basic Drug Discussion - SUSPENDED
* Neuroscience and Pharmacology Discussion - SUSPENDED
* Trip Reports -
* Drug Culture - SUSPENDED


MAPS - Exempt


RECOVERY SUPPORT

* The Dark Side -
* Sober Living -
* Mental Health -


COMMUNITY

* Healthy Living -
* Current Events and Politics - SUSPENDED
* Sex, Love and Relationships - SUSPENDED
* Philosophy and Spirituality -
* Education and Careers - DONE
* Living Advice & Visual Arts - SUSPENDED
* Science and Technology -
* The Lounge - - SUSPENDED
>> PLEASE NOTE: The prune will only review what's in TL proper. We are not doing anything with TheOldLounge or it's archive at this time.


ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

* Electronic Music Discussion - DONE
* Non-Electronic Music Discussion - DONE
* Words -
* Film & Television -
* Sports and Gaming -


REGIONAL DISCUSSION

* Australian & Asian Drug Discussion -
* European & African Drug Discussion - IN PROCESS
* North & South American Drug Discussion -




Additionally, www.pillreports.com is hosted on the same server as Bluelight:

Pillreports.net - Not being touched
 
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Is there any way to save threads for personal use? I.e. Drugs in the Media has a stack of articles that have been posted. I am intending to get a collection book together at some stage of some of these articles which have been posted.
 
Is there any way to save threads for personal use? I.e. Drugs in the Media has a stack of articles that have been posted. I am intending to get a collection book together at some stage of some of these articles which have been posted.



Excellent Question!

Have you checked the Bluelighting Tips thread in support? Hoptis provided this:

1. Supplying a title for a post (like this one) is a good way to organise information within a thread.

2. How to download an entire thread.

Under 'Thread Tools' click on 'Show Printable Version'

printable_version.gif


In the top-right, click on 'Show n posts from this thread on one page'.

printable_showall.gif


Then save the page from your browser (File > Save Page) as HTML to your computer.

3. For future reference, here's the link to resend your activation codes.

The bad news is, the tip is from 2009 :\
The good news is, our software hasn't changed much since then :D

Hopefully that will work for you. If not, let us know and we'll try to see what the new solution is, but it SHOULD be possible.
 
1) I'll need to talk to staff about the Old Lounge. It's currently archived, but maybe I'll accidentally hit delete =D

2) Staff doesn't have any, but I can share some of my private stash.
 
Woah, that is pretty drastic. A lot of important/informative posts will go the way of the dodo. I understand the costs of servers and hosting and all that, I have 2 VPS' and I could use them, the service offers it, to add websites to them and I have 2TB on each and I'm sure all of this goes way over 4TB.

Although, there's posts of mine I don't mind disappearing into nil...like many of us here. It'll also remove some garbage search results on some search engines....
So I'm thinking it's not just a cost thing, right?
 
Tbh, hardware isn't part of the problem this time. Two main drivers are better returns on searches, and if/when we upgrade it will be easier.

Woah, that is pretty drastic. A lot of important/informative posts will go the way of the dodo.?

This is why we give time for folks to review and SAVE any of those important/informative posts. Aside from our 'community' feel, a big part of what we offer to the world is that vast knowledge we absolutely do NOT want to lose! So, we encourage EVERYONE to help ensure the quality isn't thrown out in the quantity.

Also, EVERYONE, please be on the lookout for any awesome threads that warrant moving to the Best of Bluelight (BoBL). That section has some all time great threads, but it hasn't seen fresh material in a looong time. Recommend threads to your local mods for moving out of PENDING DELETION and into the appropriate ARCHIVE, back into the forum's main area for further discussion, or over to BoBL for the world to enjoy.
 
an idea for anyone wishing to save their pages from this forum,

you can get an adobe add on which when you click print it lets you save the online page as a PDF file
 
As long as one of, if not THE most fuckin hilarious questions in BlueLight history doesn't disappear (I'm sure most of you know it, but for those who don't, the Q. asked was "If it is possible to print acid tabs and if they would still work?" (and I promise that this was not a prank question!) =D then I'm cool with this %)
 
As long as one of, if not THE most fuckin hilarious questions in BlueLight history doesn't disappear (I'm sure most of you know it, but for those who don't, the Q. asked was "If it is possible to print acid tabs and if they would still work?" (and I promise that this was not a prank question!) =D then I'm cool with this %)

To be honest it has consistently been one of our most popular artefacts within the exhibits available to the general public (as a crew member you must be aware that there is potentially a locked vault for those that cannot be exposed to light or air through fear of degredation), but the acid fax is on spectacular display in the main gallery here and is unlikely to be removed any time soon, due to its educational value for those who are still tempted to at least smoke a banana skin if not criminal cannabis or the others worried about LSD / Ecstasy / brain cells collecting within their spine for the CIA to come and tap after failing to come down from drinking OJ.

The problem is (and the motivating factor for the above cliched flippancy), is that it was a regular piece of bullshit I heard 3 decades ago just before I started using drugs. I was told so many lies about them as a child that I stopped giving credence to any second hand story, however negative and the fact that the most serious ones turned out to be true is partially responsible for my downfall into junkiedom.
 
Theres really no reason to prune anything from Neuroscience and Pharmacology Discussion. Almost anything posted in that forum is valuable information.
 
Theres really no reason to prune anything from Neuroscience and Pharmacology Discussion. Almost anything posted in that forum is valuable information.

The same can be said of all the forums I frequent. I don't get it. Just because something is "old" makes it no less valuable. Very little of what I read is scientific data that needs updated to latest research. I'm spending hours per week going through old Trip Reports and so all that's going to be gone? :?

Two things:

1.) It's extremely hard to understand why you'd do this if you're a.) interested in speed and b.) refuse to adjust the cloudflare security level setting from "I'm Under Attack!" to anything less that would remove the interstitial and the five second delay that's causing so much needless frustration and grief. "Pruning" these posts will result in a speed difference of .000000000000007 seconds or less (making that up but probably not far from correct). It's a speed gain so infinitesimal as to be effectively nil. If you care about speed move to Xenforo and MariaDB on PHP 7.2.x

tldr: You don't care about speed and this won't speed things up.

2.) You don't need further time to investigate your Cloudflare decision. Literally not a single website on the internet has been under a sustained DDoS attack for this long. Take the setting down to "High" and you'll effectively get the same, exact benefit as "I'm Under Attack!" without needlessly frustrating your users.

tldr; no website on the internet uses Cloudflare as you do. Please adjust it.
 
The same can be said of all the forums I frequent. I don't get it. Just because something is "old" makes it no less valuable. Very little of what I read is scientific data that needs updated to latest research. I'm spending hours per week going through old Trip Reports and so all that's going to be gone? :?

We aren't intending to lose the informative materials, we are focused on removing all those spam posts, or pointless threads that earned a few replies and was forgotten. If it were simply deleting anything 'old' we'd be done by now. But instead, we're spending the time to give members and staff a chance to review threads and save the good stuff (into an archive, or back for active discussion) while we get rid of the threads that no longer have any value.

Two things:

1.) It's extremely hard to understand why you'd do this if you're a.) interested in speed and b.) refuse to adjust the cloudflare security level setting from "I'm Under Attack!" to anything less that would remove the interstitial and the five second delay that's causing so much needless frustration and grief. "Pruning" these posts will result in a speed difference of .000000000000007 seconds or less (making that up but probably not far from correct). It's a speed gain so infinitesimal as to be effectively nil. If you care about speed move to Xenforo and MariaDB on PHP 7.2.x

tldr: You don't care about speed and this won't speed things up.

I see where, in the OP, I mentioned speeding things up 'a bit'. You are right, it will be near negligible. Elsewhere, I've stated repeatedly, that there is the improvement in QUALITY by not searching for something and having a bunch of useless threads come back while you look for the good one. It's weeding out the useless stuff, and KEEPING the good stuff. But we need member help to identify the good stuff :\ And, by reducing the db, we are setting ourselves up for an upgrade.

tldr: It isn't the speed. Its removal of crap so people can find the quality threads, and db reduction for updates/upgrades.

2.) You don't need further time to investigate your Cloudflare decision. Literally not a single website on the internet has been under a sustained DDoS attack for this long. Take the setting down to "High" and you'll effectively get the same, exact benefit as "I'm Under Attack!" without needlessly frustrating your users.

tldr; no website on the internet uses Cloudflare as you do. Please adjust it.

Addressed in the OP, Cloudflare is a bigger issue and a separate issue we are trying to address. It effects everyone, not just a forum.
 
We aren't intending to lose the informative materials, we are focused on removing all those spam posts, or pointless threads that earned a few replies and was forgotten. If it were simply deleting anything 'old' we'd be done by now. But instead, we're spending the time to give members and staff a chance to review threads and save the good stuff (into an archive, or back for active discussion) while we get rid of the threads that no longer have any value.



I see where, in the OP, I mentioned speeding things up 'a bit'. You are right, it will be near negligible. Elsewhere, I've stated repeatedly, that there is the improvement in QUALITY by not searching for something and having a bunch of useless threads come back while you look for the good one. It's weeding out the useless stuff, and KEEPING the good stuff. But we need member help to identify the good stuff :\ And, by reducing the db, we are setting ourselves up for an upgrade.

tldr: It isn't the speed. Its removal of crap so people can find the quality threads, and db reduction for updates/upgrades.



Addressed in the OP, Cloudflare is a bigger issue and a separate issue we are trying to address. It effects everyone, not just a forum.

I appreciate the informative response to my obvious frustration. ;)

I've had experience with an import into Xenforo from vB 3.8 on a forum with more posts than this and I would assume a much larger database. It went extremely smooth using their default importer. This was a few years ago. Now they're on 2.x and everything is even further improved, with ongoing development.

I also have a good deal of experience with LAMP server admin and using a combo of CSF and Cloudflare for security. I also have "a guy" who is very affordable and extremely knowledgeable as an admin or consultant.

If I can help, let me know. It'd be nice to give back after all the info and entertainment I've gotten here.
 
I appreciate the informative response to my obvious frustration. ;)

We are ALL a bit frustrated these days. :eek: Thanks for understanding.

Also appreciate your experience and offer to help. We'll reach out if we find our 'guy' needs additional help. :\
 
I agree about neuroscience/ADD, there is very little in there of which the deletion would be of use or assistance to anybody. The subforum is not huge to begin with, and obvious complete crap is almost invariably locked or deleted (I.e people posting things like 'do I ever need to change the gauze in my crack pipe'), or if its appropriate to another subforum then it gets moved there pretty quickly, so there never really gets to be a garbage pile, it doesn't get the chance to build up.

There is one specific exception, a 'thread titles 'Dresden's chemical fluff thread' which is indeed a humongous coagulation of shite; and a thread which never should have been tolerated in the first instance but for some reason 'Dresden' was left free to post humongous quantities of the most stupid and utterly inane shite of a near schizophrenic meltdown grade of garbage.

But usually, almost invariably in ADD/neuroscience discussion we flush our own toilet when we find a turd floating inside.

Also, do keep your fingers out of mine and other's pie when it comes to PM inboxes.
 
Tbh, hardware isn't part of the problem this time. Two main drivers are better returns on searches, and if/when we upgrade it will be easier.



This is why we give time for folks to review and SAVE any of those important/informative posts. Aside from our 'community' feel, a big part of what we offer to the world is that vast knowledge we absolutely do NOT want to lose! So, we encourage EVERYONE to help ensure the quality isn't thrown out in the quantity.

Also, EVERYONE, please be on the lookout for any awesome threads that warrant moving to the Best of Bluelight (BoBL). That section has some all time great threads, but it hasn't seen fresh material in a looong time. Recommend threads to your local mods for moving out of PENDING DELETION and into the appropriate ARCHIVE, back into the forum's main area for further discussion, or over to BoBL for the world to enjoy.

I have a pastebin account, a paid one, for all the subjects I do research on, I paste links in files and the files in personalized folders, but yeah, I don't copy entire posts, unless, unless, they are extremely valuable, I hope I'll have enough time to scour around and find those. I don't really care about losing posts, I'm very sporadically here and not even logged in when I visit most of the time these days, way too much work. But I do have files with large posts that are particularly of interest to me made by other people, just not enough. Oh well, it happened before, I'll be vigilant in the future.
 
The same can be said of all the forums I frequent. I don't get it. Just because something is "old" makes it no less valuable. Very little of what I read is scientific data that needs updated to latest research. I'm spending hours per week going through old Trip Reports and so all that's going to be gone? :?

Two things:

1.) It's extremely hard to understand why you'd do this if you're a.) interested in speed and b.) refuse to adjust the cloudflare security level setting from "I'm Under Attack!" to anything less that would remove the interstitial and the five second delay that's causing so much needless frustration and grief. "Pruning" these posts will result in a speed difference of .000000000000007 seconds or less (making that up but probably not far from correct). It's a speed gain so infinitesimal as to be effectively nil. If you care about speed move to Xenforo and MariaDB on PHP 7.2.x

tldr: You don't care about speed and this won't speed things up.
Wh
2.) You don't need further time to investigate your Cloudflare decision. Literally not a single website on the internet has been under a sustained DDoS attack for this long. Take the setting down to "High" and you'll effectively get the same, exact benefit as "I'm Under Attack!" without needlessly frustrating your users.

tldr; no website on the internet uses Cloudflare as you do. Please adjust it.

When I was mods on NASADD, it reminded me of a totally unrelated forum I am mods at still, although, not a SUPAHMOD, so I can't see the garbage and other stuff out of reach for most people, but it is an SMF board system, it's extremely similar to BL's and after a crash in 2000, all posts from feb 2001 and on are all still, there, and The Lounge there is a lot like it is here, it's also called The Lounge..well there's a couple words before that but I'll keep it to myself, nothing embarrassing, no pedo-in-plain-site groups of bronies or furries and such, the non Lounge boards are about TV or about a certain adult/young teenager cartoon that that particular board was responsible for actually forcing a broadcasting and movie company's (and now an ISP and everything else...) in America into bringing back the show, producing an email chain so huge and a fax campaign from the US, Canada, Australia, Europe that they gave in and brought it back. That's all I'll say but SMF is a really good forum software, I'm sure the admins here know about that msg board software.
 
I agree about neuroscience/ADD, there is very little in there of which the deletion would be of use or assistance to anybody. The subforum is not huge to begin with, and obvious complete crap is almost invariably locked or deleted (I.e people posting things like 'do I ever need to change the gauze in my crack pipe'), or if its appropriate to another subforum then it gets moved there pretty quickly, so there never really gets to be a garbage pile, it doesn't get the chance to build up.

There is one specific exception, a 'thread titles 'Dresden's chemical fluff thread' which is indeed a humongous coagulation of shite; and a thread which never should have been tolerated in the first instance but for some reason 'Dresden' was left free to post humongous quantities of the most stupid and utterly inane shite of a near schizophrenic meltdown grade of garbage.

But usually, almost invariably in ADD/neuroscience discussion we flush our own toilet when we find a turd floating inside.

We should at least prune out the near decade of closed, unapproved, etc type threads; even if there is only a handful of the. Sounds like you guys might want to start a thread in ADD/Nuero with the mods to discuss what should/shouldn't be addressed?

Also, do keep your fingers out of mine and other's pie when it comes to PM inboxes.

Or what? You'll pm me a nasty note? Mwahahaha......
6245069


We have never pruned accounts. We might save some db size by removing old accounts (especially those with large PM inboxes) but really, it would be negligible overall for impact. We also aren't at a point of reducing inbox sizes for any reason. This is about searchable threads in public space.
 
Won't this impact search engine optimisation? A lot of the returns aren't necessarily from the bigger threads, but presumably the fact that we have a lot of combined content hitting up google. It's already waning with the ddos.

A little tip for people pruning forums. If you go down the bottom and set the sort order by replies, then you can see the majority of the bigger threads. Once they're archived you can set the thread order by views and catch anything that has few replies but a lot of views.
 
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