Webmaster Orcutt, 

I've linked let's say about 200 links to the previous forum as reference material for the heart and soul of the ever-increasing-in popularity NaturallySpeaking FAQ. Will those be dead now forever and ever? -Is there any chance of me combing through a preserved copy of the entire site in couple hours work manually relinking to an updated URL for the new server? -or even an opportunity to save the content even to my own harddrive? The old posts contain a wealth of details that I've become dependant on being there to reference at a glance to further every single one of the contained articles at a speed impossible without links. I too have been caught in the unexpected change of forums. If there is anything you can do to provide access to them, even if it's in the worst case only absolutely possible in a small window of access time, I and many users would be appreciative of the work I could accomplish with that access.

Ian

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Former primary author of Speechwiki NaturallySpeaking FAQ. 

Near the top right of the new forum is a link to the old forums.  "Search Old KnowBrainer Forum"

 

http://oldforums.knowbrainer.com/

mvan,

ok now i need to ask speechwiki host Scott Weinstein if a search and replace can be performed on all the links to change them from http://forum.knowbrainer.com to http://oldforums.knowbrainer.com

I'll direct him to this post.

Ian

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Former primary author of Speechwiki NaturallySpeaking FAQ. 

Well.

I've gone through and manually changed I'd say more than half the old links that I linked to in the Speechwiki. The images and attached documents contained within seem to be lost forever as none of those links work. I also have the sneaking suspicion some of the links don't quite point to exact same locations anymore, but I don't have any specific examples.

Ian

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Former primary author of Speechwiki NaturallySpeaking FAQ. 

so I think I may I've missed some important news.  I wonder if I read correctly. are the old knowbrainer forms really gone, again, permanently? what happened...

damn.

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Former primary author of Speechwiki NaturallySpeaking FAQ. 

Unfortunately the old forums are gone forever. The forums developed some type of techincal glitch that corrupted the database, making the forums inaccessible. Those forums used significantly different technology that the old Webmaster was familiar with, but isn't a technology that we support and the level of effort associated with repairing the forums outweighed the value that they were offering. That's not to say that the old forums didn't contain useful information, just that much of the forums were outdated as a result of the last couple of new releases of NaturallySpeaking and KnowBrainer, which have been supported on these forums.

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Regards, Webmaster

Oh no! :-(

Nah, most of it is still there...

At least until August 2006 (search function not working, however).

Cheers David.P

-------------------------

Core i5 @ Windows 7 64bit
Sennheiser MKH HF Capacitor Desktop Gun Mic @ M-AudioTransit USB
Fingerworks iGesture Multitouch Pad & 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator + Visual & Acoustic Feedback + Automatic Microphone Control
NaturallySpeaking installed in SATA RAM SSD Solid State RAM Hard Drive

 

 

Download NaturallySpeakometer and objectively measure the perfomance of your NaturallySpeaking installation, compare the impact of different hardware (microphones, processors, hard drives etc.) on your speech recognition system speed -- also compatible to Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Speech Recognition

[edits necessary for this forum not having a "preview your post" function]

If you follow one of them down, you get a page that says "This page is not archived......"

            Dana

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Dana Joan - Vero Beach, FL  - 

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical, Version 10.1; General Medical Large Vocabulary; Windows 7 Ultimate (on desktop); Windows XP Professional SR 3 (on laptop) and Sennheiser MD 431 II mic with the Andrea USB pod on both computers; LAPTOP: HP Compaq 8710p; Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00 GHz 2.00 GHz; 2.00 GB RAM; DESKTOP: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.66 GHz 2.67 GHz; 2.00 GB RAM.

Correct.

All the more it's a shame that Orcutt Labs didn't even simply manage to export the contents of the old forum (or of a backup of it) to a simple Textfile or something.

Not very professional.

David.P

-------------------------

Core i5 @ Windows 7 64bit
Sennheiser MKH HF Capacitor Desktop Gun Mic @ M-AudioTransit USB
Fingerworks iGesture Multitouch Pad & 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator + Visual & Acoustic Feedback + Automatic Microphone Control
NaturallySpeaking installed in SATA RAM SSD Solid State RAM Hard Drive

 

 

Download NaturallySpeakometer and objectively measure the perfomance of your NaturallySpeaking installation, compare the impact of different hardware (microphones, processors, hard drives etc.) on your speech recognition system speed -- also compatible to Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Speech Recognition

[edits necessary for this forum not having a "preview your post" function]

Well, I would offer up that it isn't very professional to direct criticisms without know all of the facts, but I guess that would discredit most major news organizations, so I'll digress.

The bottom line is the KnowBrainer got shafted by the previous Webmaster, which was endangering the business. Being that Lunis owns KnowBrainer and is related to me, he reached out to me for help. I explained to him at the time that building him a new site wasn't an issue - supporting the old site was. We're a small company and, as such, cannot maintain staff that is well versed in all the popular server operating systems (Linux, Unix, Windows, etc.), server-side scripting languages (ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, etc.), and databases (Oracle, MS SQL Server, MY SQL, etc.). As we advised Lunis, we could move the old site to our facilities, getting up and running, but lacked the knowledge to make any changes to it and the proper supporting software for backups. This is because the site used technologies that we do not use or support at our facility. It isn't that the technologies are bad, it is a simple matter of economics. At the time, Lunis could have invested in resources to maintain the old site, or place his resources in building the new site. Considering the problems with the old site and the cost, he took our recommendation for creating a new site. We agreed to keep the old site running as long as possible, but now being familiar the the applications it used, we gurantee the ability to repair it if it failed. This was in fact the eventual outcome. The site failed and the database information was corrupted, along with some of the core code for the application.

For a while we did maintain the original records of the site on a CD ROM for archival purposes. However, the issue of the old forums was raised and subsequently rested a couple of years ago. We may or may not still have the CD of the old forums information. Exporting the My SQL database records to text files isn't likely going to be very useful as that is thousands of files that aren't going to be connected in a relationship to each other (so you can follow a message thread). The only viable solution should be to attempt to restart the old site with a hosting service and technical staff that is well versed in the software that is used. That software is very old at this point and would need to be upgraded/patched to the current versions to prevent attacks and corruption as happened with the last version we had online. Lunis believed that the forum software had fairly extensive modifications from the old webmaster as well, which would have to be addressed in patching/upgrading the software by a skilled programmer. Simply being the old forums back online as-is wouldn't get us very far as KnowBrainer.com receives an average of 130 to 170 attacks per hour (SQL Injection attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, etc.) not including port scans and viruses. The chart below shows the attack volume for yesterday, which was pretty-good as we were down to a maximum of 141 attacks for a given hour and only 2450 attacks for the day. We have multi-tier firewalls in place, Intrusion Prevention Services (IPS) applicances, active SNMP event monitoring, hourly backups, and other services in place to secure the Websites and other services (e-mail, Instant Messaging, etc.) that we host, but these applicances and software are designed and tuned to the Web technologies that we use, which doesn't include the technology used by the old forums.

So it is possible, if the backup records do exist, to restore and upgrade the old services to make them viable and searchable, but I think it would be significant effort and cost.

 That would be my professional opinion, of course.

-------------------------

Regards, Webmaster

Webmaster, that's a lot of exculpation, and technical explanations.

 

Still, even with the simple function "make PDF from website" offered by Adobe Acrobat (and I'm sure there's plenty of freeware around that can do this even better) it would be possible (as a measure of emergency) to save the entire contents of the Phorum forever to a single PDF file (including clickable threads etc.).

 

With regard to professionalism, I'm very sorry having to say again that, unfortunately, also the current forum is not even approximately up to date (as only compared to an average, typical internet forum these days) regarding accessibility, speed, ease of use and navigation.

 

David.P

[edits as usual because of the buggy WYSYWYG forum editor and for the "Preview your Post" function missing]

-------------------------

Core i5 @ Windows 7 64bit
Sennheiser MKH HF Capacitor Desktop Gun Mic @ M-AudioTransit USB
Fingerworks iGesture Multitouch Pad & 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator + Visual & Acoustic Feedback + Automatic Microphone Control
NaturallySpeaking installed in SATA RAM SSD Solid State RAM Hard Drive

 

 

Download NaturallySpeakometer and objectively measure the perfomance of your NaturallySpeaking installation, compare the impact of different hardware (microphones, processors, hard drives etc.) on your speech recognition system speed -- also compatible to Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Speech Recognition

[edits necessary for this forum not having a "preview your post" function]

I don't believe that there were any valid facts in your last post, so I'll let rest with the fact that we are unable to resolve your frustration with this issue.

-------------------------

Regards, Webmaster

 

Well Webmaster, here's the facts you missed, about some problems with the current forum. All of these problems are absent on an average internet user forum.

At present, I am frequenting about five dozen different user fori, other than the Knowbrainer forum. Unfortunately, and I am very sorry having to say that, not many forums that I regularly visit have so many bugs, drawbacks and missing basic features as the KB forum.

Here's the list:

-        Slow navigation and long page load times.

-        Sluggish (overly java-ish) response when clicking on links.

-        Click on "last message of thread" icon on the "messages" page doesn't take you there, instead it takes you to tho top of page 1 of the respective thread.

-        Still no "preview your message" button - un.be.lie.vable.

-        No "reply with quote" button.

-        No possiblity to add the author's name of the quoted message.

-        Search function is very rudimental and doesn't find many threads that are definitely there.

-        Buggy, unneccesary and overloaded wysiwyg-editor that keeps breaking even the simplest formatting.

-        Any post editing makes the thread jump to top and erroneously changes the "last post by.." entry on the "messages" page as if a new post had been written in the thread.

-        First click on a thread index item reloads the page instead of just jumping to the target post.

-        RSS-feed very often does not work properly or at all (in firefox).

Cheers David.P

 

[multiple edits for ... well you know] 

-------------------------

Core i5 @ Windows 7 64bit
Sennheiser MKH HF Capacitor Desktop Gun Mic @ M-AudioTransit USB
Fingerworks iGesture Multitouch Pad & 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator + Visual & Acoustic Feedback + Automatic Microphone Control
NaturallySpeaking installed in SATA RAM SSD Solid State RAM Hard Drive

 

 

Download NaturallySpeakometer and objectively measure the perfomance of your NaturallySpeaking installation, compare the impact of different hardware (microphones, processors, hard drives etc.) on your speech recognition system speed -- also compatible to Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Speech Recognition

[edits necessary for this forum not having a "preview your post" function]

Ah, I see, you had specific issues with the functionality of the forums. You should have simply offered them instead of crazy suggestions like saving an entire forum-based Website as a PDF file. I'll gladly respond to specific issues:

1. Slow Navigation: I don't experience this issue. The forums does implement a lot of javascript services for some features (often stuff I don't find on other forums, but that's ok). I turned on system debugging to show render times for each page and all of the included code, the longest render time I received was 782 ms on the home page.. Most pages, including long thread views, were rendered in an average of 200 ms (297 ms, 187 ms, 234 ms, etc.). Naturally, Internet connection speed and the PC's processing time of javascript will increase the time it takes to actually see the pages on the browser. For example, these forums scream in Google's Beta "Chrome" browser, likely because of the faster javascript rendering and less overall overhead as compared to something like IE.
2. Sluggish response on links: same as above.
3. Last message of thread icon: not sure what you meant by this one. If you can point out where you're seeing this problem I'll take a look at it.
4. Preview Message Button: Yup, this should definitely be added. As you so eloquently pointed out, other sites do have this feature and it is a very useful tool. We don't have a specific timetable for adding it as we haven't scheduled it as a priority with Lunis. We can discuss this with Lunis to see if we can move this up to the top of the priority list.
5. No reply with quote/add authors name: No this feature isn't there. We do provide a quote capability and a full view of the messages below the WYSIWYG editor so you can quote easily. A specific reply with quote tool could be added but we didn't feel it was critical with the other functionality provided and also, but not being there, would inhibit people reposting long quotes of entire messages that we see often on other forums. Again, we could add this feature - we just didn't feel as strongly about it as you and hadn't received significant complaints about it.
6. Poor search functionality: Not sure what you mean by this. I haven't found it to not return the information that was being sought. If there is specific features that you feel it needs let me know, or if you have specific examples of failed searches.
7. Buggy WYSIWYG editor: Again, I've found the editor to work pretty well and support features like HTML/formatted postings, which are highly problematic and not supported by many forums. I haven't found it to be overloaded - a surprising statement; it supports basic formatting features. It is a commercially-available editor that was already embedded in the forum software, but it could be replaced with a newer or different version if people feel strongly enough about it. I've seldom had to edit a post and surprised by the difficulty that you have with it.
8. Post editing changes date: Correct, editing a post changes its date and relocates it in the thread view. That shouldn't have been how the forum software developers designed the software. I will take note to fix that.
9. First click on thread index doesn't work: Again, I can't replicate this problem. When I click on the first thread, such as with this message thread, I'm taken directly to Nastajus' original posting in 2006. I'm using IE7, perhaps this is a FireFox or other browser issue?
10. Flakey RSS feeds - The developers of the forum software did create their own RSS services and there could be an issue with them. I know that I have played with the service a few times and gotten different results in different RSS reader, which doesn't make any sense. The application architecture that the forums are hosted on now includes built-in RSS services and we should likely make changes to switch to these instead of the custom-developed services. That would also position us better for future changes and other capabilities like SMS. Again, I don't know how critical this is to people and it is up to Lunis what priority we place on each change.

-------------------------

Regards, Webmaster