TromboneChat

Finally, the wait is over! As many of you know, Matt K built a bot to make a backup of the TTF in the event it eventually might go down. The formatting was obviously different from phpBB so it took some time to get all of it imported but we finished the process earlier this morning.

All content on The Trombone Forum published prior to 2007 was under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US)), which can be found here:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

In short this means that the content is free to be shared (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) so long as the following terms are met:

1. Attribution

• Appropriate credit must be given
• A link to the license must be provided (see the above hyperlink)
• And any changes need to be indicated (So long as these changes are done in any reasonable manner but not in anyway that suggests the licensor endorses the usage.)

2. Non Commercial

• The material may not be used for commercial purposes

3. NoDerivatives

• If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

There are no further restrictions, not even legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Additionally, the copyright indicator on the TTF never displayed a copyright for content outside of the 2000-2006 window so most content probably doesn’t apply, but we wanted to put this here for the sake of showing that we are fully compliant with the content.

Therefore:

• All content in the section of the Trombone Chat forums labelled “TTF Archives” comes from the Trombone Forum. Any user prefixed with “ttf_” is a user from The Trombone Forum and all of the content they have provided originates from The Trombone Forum.
• The link to the CCL can be found here.
• I have made the following changes to the content:
  1. HTML has been largely converted to BBCode
  2. Smileys (and most other images) have been removed and replaced, at least temporarily, with the word “IMAGE”
  3. Certain topics with malformed HTML or BBCode have been deleted or altered to fix the malformed formatting
  4. Quotations did not translate very well in many cases, so quotations may not be as evident as they were in the TTF
  5. There may be other formatting or even content issues that were altered by the code that copied the messages into BBCode format which we are unaware of
• The material is not being used for commercial purposes
• We have not remixed or otherwise transformed the material as per the third bubble here

We hope everybody enjoys this resource and are glad to be able to provide this archive for the rich information that has been generously provided over the years. We are locking all of the topics so that nobody may post into the archives. We want to keep all material moving forward on the main site!

Beautiful job, Matt K! We all appreciate the work you did with this.

Very very cool to have all that information not lost!

Incredible. Great work!

I guess all those posts will be indexed by google over time?

cozzagiorgi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 07, 2018 3:58 pm Incredible. Great work!

I guess all those posts will be indexed by google over time?

Correct. And Bing, etc. Bots have already begun doing their work.

Kudos!

Great to be able to search here and find those TTF posts!

Hard to overestimate how important those will be, longer term.

Easy to underestimate just how much work it was to get it done.

My hat is off to Matt!

cozzagiorgi wrote: ↑Sat Apr 07, 2018 3:58 pm Incredible. Great work!

I guess all those posts will be indexed by google over time?

We've already had several hits from Google so I suspect in the coming days we'll start to see them show up in Google.

I also want to point out that there are some odd duplicates that either existed in the original or maybe were a consequence of people editing them. If you see a duplicate post in the archive, you can report it to us. (In the latte theme, this is the exclamation point). I made two special reports: one for duplicate posts and the other for mangled posts. I gave everyone read only access except the moderators who can make any changes flagged. That way we keep new content new, old content old, but also simultaneously can preserve the old content!

Where is the link?

No link! They're on the front page for convenience

Grah...go to the main page and scroll to the bottom. The archives are listed under its own header.

Well done, Matt! question...the 'arhives' classifieds contains a folder 'classifieds' (2 layers). Can the hyperlink to directly to the sub folder ? (hope I'm making sense in the description)

RichC wrote: ↑Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:02 pm ...
Well done, Matt! question...the 'arhives' classifieds contains a folder 'classifieds' (2 layers). Can the hyperlink to directly to the sub folder ? (hope I'm making sense in the description)

The Classifieds were in 2 "layers" in the original TTF as well.

I wouldn't get too excited about listings there -- most of them are over 2 months old and would have been deleted by now.

If you are looking to buy or sell, use the Chat Classifieds. They are better set up than TTF (which was intended to be temporary anyway).

To expand upon Bruce's point, the classifieds were actually in their own forum but the software on the TTF represented them differently than the phpBB layout, thus the odd subforum indication. We actually intended to hide them because, as Bruce mentioned, they are old at this point and further the entire Archives are locked for uses so you cannot post in them. To avoid confusion we still might hide them (since we don't want anyone getting frustrated when they can't post a classified ad, the bot measures we have in place are confusing enough!).

Yup...understood & agreed with, Bruce...a non-issue. I wasn't suggesting wasting any time on it. Just thought it might be simply directing a link differently. Thx.

Matt K wrote: ↑Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:13 pm We actually intended to hide them because, as Bruce mentioned, they are old at this point and further the entire Archives are locked for uses so you cannot post in them. To avoid confusion we still might hide them (since we don't want anyone getting frustrated when they can't post a classified ad, the bot measures we have in place are confusing enough!).

Just my worthless 2 cents...might want to keep them available in case one wants to refresh their memory about a particular sale, etc.,

Thanks for your hard work, Matt...must have gone through a lot of coffee working on that!

This is amazing, thank you so much for your hard work on this resource! Can’t imagine the amount of work put in to make this happen, but having this information preserved and accessible is invaluable! Thank you!

Not worthless at all! Now that we have newer software it makes much more sense to keep them. One of the reasons we limited classified ads in the TTF was that the search feature was basically non existent so trying to wade through years of classifieds ads could be really frustrating! If we get complaints about it there are a couple options we could do to keep them from being confused with the current listings too.

And there was MUCH coffee involved, although that isn't too different from a normal day for me. I've been on a cold brew kick lately and I make a LOT of it with my liter sized mason jar

A thousand thanks. May you grow old and wise, may your children love you, and may you never lose your place while counting rests!

Awesome work, guys!!

It's funny. It kept getting mentioned in certain threads and we had to actually delete and edit a few of our own posts to keep it under wraps. Not to mention bite our tongues as the requests kept piling up.

Glad we could get it done.

That was the hardest part!!

Well done guys.

I reckon this makes TC much more valuable.

Amazing!!! I can’t thank you enough!

Bravo, Matt -- and everyone else who has been involved in this labor of love on our behalf.

This will make our new home so much more useful! The analogy seems apropos. It is kind of like we moved into a new house and the moving company just now brought our furniture.

Thank you!
-Andy in OKC

This is an excellent and amazing resource.

Now, can you delete all the stupid stuff I said and only leave the nuggets of minor trivia that I provide?

Y’all deserve to be paid for this. Make the books transparent and I am sure many of us would be happy to subscribe.

Cheers,
Andy

Great job.

S

Yes. All of the above. Much awesome. Very wow.

Copyright is implied once the content is fixed on a medium, unless explicitly placed in the public domain.

bhcordova wrote: ↑Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:26 pm Copyright is implied once the content is fixed on a medium, unless explicitly placed in the public domain.

If I recall correctly, TTF had some language that put the content in the public domain (or something to that effect). Even if that is not the case, archiving the TTF info here probably falls under Fair Use.

Glad everyone likes the resource. And by the way, the search function on our site works very well. I tried it myself.

I was digging through the terms of service, which can be found in the wayback machine here as here, and found this included in a post from RLB:

Post editing and deleting
Posts may be edited by the poster for a period of up to four days after posting. Please note that, since the content is never actually fixed in a medium, the poster therefore holds no copyright on the material. Neither does The Trombone Forum need a license to use/host the content in the post. All posts are therefore public domain content.

So it does appear to be included in the public domain. We'll still keep the Creative Commons License information for the sake of full transparency.

That is fantastic! Great job!

With this development TC has become THE place to visit for trombone matters...... BRAVO.

Chris

For those who are continuing to have difficulty locating the archive - here is my experience.

1) The archive is at the bottom of the page - if you don't scroll down far enough, you won't see it.

2) I think that I did not see the archive when I just came to the site - but when I logged in, it appeared. I am not sure whether this is an indication that the archive is "registered users only" content - or whether I was pulling a copy of the page from cache on my machine, and logging in was enough to force my browser to fully redownload the page. However, the reason is not that important - simply registering an account and logging in probably will be enough for you to see the page. If you want to browse anonymously - you might find success by clearing the cache in your browser.

Nice job, fellas!

Strong work! ya might want to prefix the forum names to be clear in all different views:

TTF Archives: Classified Advertisements
TTF Archives: Town Hall
TTF Archives: Teaching & Learning
TTF Archives: Creation and Performance
TTF Archives: Horns, Gear, and Equipment
TTF Archives: Practice Break

My original plan was to make it it's own subforum so it would be clear that it was the archive but I didn't make the subforum right! It's a good suggestion either way and we'll probably get to that shortly. We have something else were working on right now that's really cool! But it needs refinement!

I'm not sure why they aren't showing up as unregistered. I may have forgot to give Guests access. I can check into that soon as well. I know for sure I gave bots access because I want the content to appear on Google/Bing/etc!

I've also noticed that "sticky" posts are not at the top; apparently they lost their "stickiness" in the transfer. Still, what we have is pretty good and I'm not going to complain.

BGuttman wrote: ↑Mon Apr 09, 2018 7:25 pm I've also noticed that "sticky" posts are not at the top; apparently they lost their "stickiness" in the transfer. Still, what we have is pretty good and I'm not going to complain.

Yeah, oddly enough that information wasn't present anywhere in the site frontend. It must have been a database entry or something that merely affected it's placement in the display.

I created a "report" topic for problems with the archive so everyone can feel free to report content that is either poorly formatted (missing syntax or something like that) or duplicated. Similarly, if something was a sticky, report it as a formatting problem and I'll sticky it.

I think we Mods can also sticky. If I see something I remember as a sticky I'll correct it.

It seems like the archive posts only go back so far, or might have a post limit? Or is that just my server's view?

It's possible there are some missing posts. It *should* be everything but because we didn't have access to the backend, I ended up building a scraper for it. The basic behavior was that it would get to a page, see if any threads were not in the database and if not, to scrap it then move on to the next page. If there was activity in the particular thread while it was scraping... in hind sight... it may have went on to the next page without getting all of the information.

If there is something that's glaringly not present, I can change the URL of my bot to go to the wayback machine. I'm not sure the extent of the missingness (if indeed there are missing posts).

Great stuff. Top effort, Matt.

Is it possible to associate the "ttf_***" usernames with our new TC usernames? I've used the same one (been using it in various places for a long time now), but others have changed, and it can be confusing (e.g. I would not have realised that Neo Bri was Sliphorn if someone hadn't explicitly mentioned it).

Great work! Thanks to everyone who has made this resource accessible again.

MoominDave wrote: ↑Tue Apr 10, 2018 3:29 am Great stuff. Top effort, Matt.

Is it possible to associate the "ttf_***" usernames with our new TC usernames? I've used the same one (been using it in various places for a long time now), but others have changed, and it can be confusing (e.g. I would not have realised that Neo Bri was Sliphorn if someone hadn't explicitly mentioned it).

That would be the icing on the cake!

MoominDave wrote: ↑Tue Apr 10, 2018 3:29 am Great stuff. Top effort, Matt.

Is it possible to associate the "ttf_***" usernames with our new TC usernames? I've used the same one (been using it in various places for a long time now), but others have changed, and it can be confusing (e.g. I would not have realised that Neo Bri was Sliphorn if someone hadn't explicitly mentioned it).

Possible - Yes! Practically, probably not unfortunately. It would take a lot of time to build the crosswalk (there are around 2800 users with the 'ttf_' prefix) and it would make difficult to update if I did discover which posts were missing and then later add them. We also don't want to make it so that people can edit (so we can comply with the Creative Commons License, if indeed it does end up being applicable) so we'd have to apply special permissions to the site too. And then beyond that running into the issue where the reverse happens; someone may have had a common handle over there and they stopped using it and no longer do any posts and some new person comes along to TromboneChat and starts using it... now I've accidentally attributed posts to the wrong person! But nothing is off the table per se so as I have time after building some of the other ideas, we may have some way to do that.

Great job Matt! Thanks for all your work to make this all possible.

MoominDave wrote: ↑Tue Apr 10, 2018 3:29 am Great stuff. Top effort, Matt.

Is it possible to associate the "ttf_***" usernames with our new TC usernames? I've used the same one (been using it in various places for a long time now), but others have changed, and it can be confusing (e.g. I would not have realised that Neo Bri was Sliphorn if someone hadn't explicitly mentioned it).

We discussed that as the original idea, but decided it'd make more sense to not have any directly linked. But most of the time you can associate the two accounts via good-old human association. That solves a host of potential legal problems, etc.

It seems like the archive posts only go back so far, or is it just what I'm seeing for some reason?

Check out what I had mentioned a few posts back. There might be some missingness due to a problem with the scraper that was unrealized until now.

Great that all that information is not lost! Thanks to you for starting Trombone Chat and saving posts from TTF!

Jerry Walker