Yes, it's appears that it's possible for at least some of the content. It would seem that some parts are inaccessible at the moment (file attachments, for example cannot be downloaded - because we can't log in). I've done some preliminary work to test the viability though, and it looks feasible. If I were to invest more time in this, who would be interested? (it could, for example, be set up as a fresh forum, or stored as an archive).
Agreed, I think legal advice would be needed. It says this at the bottom of the Home page on the site: Copyright © 2024 MH Sub I, LLC dba vBulletin. All rights reserved. Don't know what that means though!
I suspect that copyright is for the software that underpins the functionality of the forum & it's database. It would be interesting to know who 'owns' the content of that & any other forum. I was always under the impression if it's on the web & accessible world wide then no one does... but don't quote me on that.
No, it’s a little murkier than that. The copyright does indeed refer to the software, and not the data. The question is whether there was any T’s & c’s that we agreed to when we registered that assigns ownership of the content. However - that said, the investigative work that I’ve been doing has been “unauthenticated”, meaning that it is done without using a userid (and therefore the user has not agreed to any T’s & C’s). I’m not a lawyer (but I’m regularly involved in commercial law for IT procurement). I have a view on this, but would be interested if someone has more specific experience, but a more in depth conversation might be better off-forum (eg in private chat) Mike
I think the other issue would be GDPR compliance. There is a lot of personal identity information which falls under a load of realy onerous governance rules, especially as the information on the site is Europe and US wide.
I think it's about time we shared this update - For the last few weeks, I've been working on a contingency here. I noted that the domainname expiry for ducati851and888.net was approaching, and was worried that the forum would disappear off the Internet, taking the content with it. As such, I wrote some software tools to extract the publicly available content (~76,000 posts), then to transform it into a format that can be used by forum software. I'll save you the boring detail of how it accomplishes that - but the upshot is that I have a copy of the ducati851and888.net forum, running on a server on my home network (using different forum software than is currently broken on the ducati851and888.net site). Along the way - I noticed that the ducati851and888.com domainname had expired (some of us will remember that this was the original site for the forum, and Jimmy had to move it some years back), and I was able to re-register it. I also enlisted the help of some of the members of this conversation to help test and check the data quality, and I think what we have is pretty good, and capable of being launched, if necessary. Since that point, Jimmy appears to have recently renewed the ducati851and888.net domainname. This shows intent to do something, I'm hoping his plan is to fix the site (perhaps this apparent intent was coincidental, or perhaps this was prompted by the news of our plans). So - I think for the moment, we're going to wait and see what happens before making any decisions, but we have an independent capability here, should we need it. Mike
That's great, and this should be respectful of the originators of the forum but preserve this jewel from extinction. Thank you
Great! We know the data is now safeguarded and there are now two potential short term solutions to make it available again to the community. Things should be clearer by the end of summer. Thanks Mike!
@hindsight aka Mike - I have posted details on all of the 851 and 888, plus Corsa variant Facebook Groups that I am a member of and can post to. Seems to have lifted a few people up. Here is a link to one of the posts https://www.facebook.com/groups/1097187034589180/permalink/1295605558080659/ Chris
In the absence of the Forum, lots of people headed to Facebook to regroup and share. We need them back on the Web forum now........Your work is almost done.
