How Much Valuable BitcoinTalk Information Have We Lost Over the Years?

[SuperBitMan]

Bitcointalk forum has been around for years now and a lot of discussions, technical explanations and personal experiences have been shared by members here, some of this discussions, technical explanations and personal experiences shared in this forum is now becoming very difficult to access.

Some of this old thread now contains broken external link, missing photos and even very hard to discover by newbies. I believe this threads or discussions still contain useful information, lessons that is worth preserving.

It is true that forum evolve and not every old information or discussion must be preserved or maintained, but you can agree with me that there are some discussions or threads that is still very useful.

Some discussions are not outdated because they are still informative, educative and helpful to the bitcoin community especially to newbies.


Now do you guys think BitcoinTalk has lost access to some valuable knowledge over the years? Share your honest opinion or thought

[Bitcoin_Arena]

This is something we have no control over. Websites can go offline at any time.

I remember when the merit system was introduced, people really tried to create different kinds of informative threads and guides, but this seems to have slowed down with time, perhaps due to the fear of repetition and lack of motivation. Back then, those merits were a very good motivating factor for members who had not yet ranked.up.

I think threads with outdated or broken links can still be recreated if the OP is no longer active. There is no harm in doing that.

[Mia Chloe]

~snip

Nothing has been lost actually except you wanna include stuff like PMs that were deleted one way or the other. that aside every other information is still actively accessible on the forum and as for the broken images it’s a fault from the image hosting site especially IMGUR.

There was a movement I think a year back that focused on recovering most of the broken images and LoyceV and some other members retrieved a lot but not all.

[un_rank]

Majority of forum information is in text form, I will guess it is more than 90% of it. We still have all of those preserved here.
Broken imgur links was the major issue that caused loss of information. There were fixes like this ^[1], but with many members inactive, it will not get around quickly enough, or ever for some posts.

I do not know how old threads are difficult to discover for newbies. If they read on how to search effectively and have an idea of what they are looking for, they should find it

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5452662.0

- Jay -

[_act_]

Now do you guys think BitcoinTalk has lost access to some valuable knowledge over the years? Share your honest opinion or thought

People should expect broken external links as some sites may remove the content or the website is no more working. About the external link, you can copy the image link and upload it on any image uploading website to see the image.

Most of the useful information for me are texts. Some that have images, the images can still be seen just as I explained it.

[lovesmayfamilis]

What led you to this opinion? What kind of information is lost? To talk about it, you need to know exactly what you're missing; otherwise, it's like saying, "Go there without knowing where" or "Find something without knowing what."

Won't the newbies find it? Do you really think they'll all be looking? AI today goes ahead of their desire to find something, and believe me, anyone who wants to find something will definitely find it if there is a desire. Once again, think about how many of us read the forum "from cover to cover," and be honest in your conclusions🤷‍♀️.

[Majestic-milf]

What led you to this opinion? What kind of information is lost? To talk about it, you need to know exactly what you're missing; otherwise, it's like saying, "Go there without knowing where" or "Find something without knowing what."

Won't the newbies find it? Do you really think they'll all be looking? AI today goes ahead of their desire to find something, and believe me, anyone who wants to find something will definitely find it if there is a desire. Once again, think about how many of us read the forum "from cover to cover," and be honest in your conclusions🤷‍♀️.

I second this take. It all depends on what someone is looking for and we've not banned anyone from asking questions if they don't know how to ask about some information or discussion or get access to it right? And if it's the newbies the op is bothered about, I think so far it's mostly "hi, I'm a newbie" threads that they usually post and even when some of them are given guidelines on how to navigate, not all might use it. So I don't see a big deal here.

[SamReomo]

We haven't lost any valuable information, all the posts and threads are there and anyone who wants to gain that information can still access it on this forum. The only thing we have lost over the years is those members who contributed valuable information on this forum during their active days, the rest is same and their posts/threads are still available on this forum.

The newbies who join the forum with learning intention can still learn so many things by read good and informative posts. The members who are no more active on this forum will always live in our hearts because their words are still available in untouched form on this forum.

[Alvin_talk]

Now do you guys think BitcoinTalk has lost access to some valuable knowledge over the years? Share your honest opinion or thought

Ironically, I don't think we've lost anything, I only think we've gone past those days where newbies and even some snr members are willing to put meaningful effort in research to get the information they desire in the forum. Broken images and links are not the cause of our ignorance, because there are still methods to mitigate these things just as other users have pointed out above.

The real issue is the lack of motivation from some users, instead on focusing on important things, they rely heavily on ai to do the dirty job for them and at the end of the day, they learn nothing new. So do we need to blame that on broken images or links?

[Welsh]

Sure, as with all things. You can potentially prevent this by using archive sites if you think certain information is useful. A lot of people do this concerning articles / news articles that they think might be taken down in the future or lost. Obviously, you can't guarantee that the archive website is going to remain up either.

But, to answer your question sure we've probably lost a decent amount especially with photos, but on the flip side we can still discuss those topics now and maybe from a new angle since its been a few years. I think that's the good thing about discussion, there's always going to be developments and new points of view.

There's been a few mining topics I've read, and they were now missing their photos of their setups and that which would've been interesting to see. Although, this isn't strictly a forum issue either, a lot of them have been lost on the actual site they were hosting the photos.

[RGBTC]

I don't remember whether I lost valuable information on this forum; not everything of importance is meant to last, sometimes it’s just a reminder, an urgent note, or something similar. Furthermore, what one person considers "valuable" may differ from another’s perspective.
Moreover, the loss of written information does not necessarily mean that the knowledge is lost from human memory. There are things that were once considered significant but have gradually become common knowledge, easily put into practice such as the how to create a multisig wallet.

[LoyceV]

There was a movement I think a year back that focused on recovering most of the broken images and LoyceV and some other members retrieved a lot but not all.

It's already 3.5 years ago that I created [get yours] Images from imgur + All links to your own posts.
Ironically, I lost many pictures myself in my early years here, when tinypic.com ended their image hosting. Even my first post was affected.

[SatoPrincess]

Almost everything on the forum can be found on bitlist.co or the other scrapers on the forum, however, I doubt newbies are even looking for these information. And to be fair, I can’t think of anything that’s been “lost” asides from mega guide resources that was deleted by a former forum member just before he left the forum.

[MarryWithBTC]

Almost everything on the forum can be found on bitlist.co or the other scrapers on the forum, however, I doubt newbies are even looking for these information. And to be fair, I can’t think of anything that’s been “lost” asides from mega guide resources that was deleted by a former forum member just before he left the forum.

I was reading through an old interesting, I cannot remember the exact thread and a good information was shared in an image form, and unfortunately, the image link was broken and I couldn't get the information.

I tried my best to resuscitate the link through the help of AI and I couldn't, although it was promising that I could but something distracted me.
If there's any bulk information lost, it would be during transition from old forum, but I doubt