While learning about virtual feeds I found this post on the old forum super helpful. This contains information that’s not present in the emoncms documentation or elsewhere on the main website (guide/learn/resources). Are links to the old forum stable for long term linking?
For the broader virtual feeds topic, what’s the best way to suggest a pull request to get this documentation into the main guide(s)?
I believe they are. The dynamic database-based forum has been converted to static HTML. @glyn.hudson, @TrystanLea or @Gwil will be able to give you a definitive answer. Alas, some attachments have been lost in the process of extracting the data from Drupal.
Yes links to the old form are 100% stable. The old forum as been archived to static html, this makes changing the old forum very difficuit which also means that the links will be even more stable now than when the old forum was active. The old forum html files are all on github if you want to search / host locally: GitHub - openenergymonitor/forum-archive: Archive of old OpenEnergyMonitor forums (May 2016) https://openenergymonitor.org/forum-archive
All file attachments have been archived (none have been lost): forum-archive/sites/default/files at master · openenergymonitor/forum-archive · GitHub
However, if an file was ‘attached’ to a post but not linked into the post body then the link to this attachment won’t show in the static html. I am working on fixing this.
I will let @TrystanLea advise on where the best place for the virtual feed docs to go. I agree, that post by @nchaveiro on Virtual Feeds is very good and should be in the latest documentation.
Lost, as in: some are no longer attached/linked in their original place.
Lost, as in: there’s no obvious record of the file name in the original place.
Lost, as in: several attachments are mentioned in the text in this thread, in particular a circuit diagram and a 'scope trace, but though the images that appear are listed on GitHub, I cannot see the others. I could not find the zipped file that I attached to the final post, and I know the name because I kept a copy when I got it off Martin. So that attachment has definitely been lost, or is not listed and does not show in a search.
[Edit]
Wayback Machine gives the missing files as:
Ampy_meter_decoder.zip 212.8 KB
energy monitor pulses.xls 252 KB
5192j.xls 395 KB
and the one I know about:
Ampy_meter_reader.zip 1.17 KB
Nor could I.
I downloaded the entire archive. Uncompressed it,and searched for the ampy_meter_reader.zip file. No Joy.
The search found the three images you mentioned, and three files with .tmp as the last three letters in their names.
I searched the entire archive for .zip files and found only 65 of them.
Thanks, Bill. So it wasn’t me after all.
No it’s certainly not you. I have lost several hours looking for stuff too.
I’m starting to see a pattern emerge and now I think that “attached files” were NOT retained, the only “attached files” that I have managed to locate are those that are also linked to from within a post somewhere, this leads me to think that only “linked-inline files” were retained and as a result, only the attached files that also happened to be linked inline were saved, everything else was lost.
I could be wrong, I hope I am, but with no file names attached to the original posts and all the files in one big pot there seem as good as lost even if they are there.
I too noticed the low number of zip files, and I also noticed there are no files ending “.xls.txt” or “.xlxs.txt” or “.csv.txt” or “.ino.txt” which I find odd.
If ever a similar thing happens now, we’re in an even worse situation, because every upload appears to be saved under what I’m guessing is a hash/checksum of the file/file name that for all the world looks to be a random string if hex digits.
E.g.
…/ffbd7dd50d5f22b4b8a7c39c9523276a002f8eff_1_690x349.JPG
So there’ll be no means of reattaching the files to their original homes even if they are saved, other than manually trying to figure out which thread and post the file is most relevant to.
Indeed, but one would hope lessons are being learnt along the way.