Teamswift.net Acquisition

macuserman

Administrator
Staff member
Alright, so I just wanted to share a site update with everyone. I was waiting for things to be further along, but it looks like things are going to take a lot longer than I had anticipated.

So to start with I have an announcement regarding teamswift, I finally was able to work out a deal and purchase the site from Jess at the beginning of July. This has been a long time coming, I was working on this for months. It was partly this which has distracted me from doing some of the work to the the repository that I had initally planned.

The domain name is now owned by yours truly, and it is currently pointing here to the repository. If you search for teamswift.net it should bring you here. I hadn't originally planned to point it here, but there have been some hiccups in getting the actual site database and info transfered to me. At this point I have no idea how long that will take or if it's even going to happen unfortunatly. I will keep working on it, but for now I don't have it and I don't know when I will. Because of this I went ahead and pointed the domain here, so that orphaned swifters could find us, and as a result you might have noticed there has been a marked increase in new members, which is a great thing for the site.

I wanted to wait, until I had teamswift up and running and all the bits ironed out before sharing, but the cat's out of the bag already with the domain redirecting here and I felt I should share with all of you where we are with things.

A couple of quick points I want to address:
1. The repository is here to stay, no matter what I decide to do with teamswift if and when I get the site data, the repository will stay here and continue to grow and be the best site that we can make it.

2. Well what will you do with teamswift when/if you finally get the site data? I'm not 100% sure yet what will happen with it, but there are several possibilities. One way or another I will make the site available as a resource to be searched. The way things are looking right now it may end up just hosted as is so that search will work and we can use it as a reference archive resource. I'm sure many of you will have strong opinions about what should be done, I'd be happy to hear them, however until I actually have the site in my possesion it's all a mute point really.

I just want to reaffirm everyone that the repository is here to stay anything posted here is safe and will be for the foreseeable future unless something catastrophic happens to me. Let's hope that's not the case! Even if/when teamswift is finally back up, it will not be to replace this site, it will likely either be merged in, or hosted as a static resource. I personally plan to start cleaning up and moving over a lot of the data from teamswift that I have in my archive/webscrape manually. I do have it posted at www.ssgtirep.com/tsarchive however it is not fully functional and you can't search which is probably the most important feature that is missing. I have no idea when the site data will be available, but I'm not going to sit around doing nothing waiting for it in the meantime.

Anyhow, that's all I have to say about it for now. I'll try to keep you guys posted on any updates :)
 
i can see this news now that I recovered my password and was able to log in!

I do hope that when you get control of Teamswift that you can let it run side by side with ssgtirepository.

That way all the existing TS members can use their existing profile to access and fix or reply to hundreds if not thousands of still relevant posts and save hours of effort recreating or moving pictures from the TS Gallery that link to Teamswift posts and even GMF posts.. picture links are broken right now justlike when Photobucket did its suspension of thrd party photo links.

Cheers
Tom
 
Good job Ivan in the purchase of TS. Are you going to add a Gallery section here like TS had back in the day? I'd love to see complete folders and all like it used to have.
 
suzukitom said:
i can see this news now that I recovered my password and was able to log in!

I do hope that when you get control of Teamswift that you can let it run side by side with ssgtirepository.

That way all the existing TS members can use their existing profile to access and fix or reply to hundreds if not thousands of still relevant posts and save hours of effort recreating or moving pictures from the TS Gallery that link to Teamswift posts and even GMF posts.. picture links are broken right now just like when Photobucket did its suspension of third party photo links.

Cheers
Tom
I plan to host teamswift as a separate site once I am able to get the site info and database. I have paid for it and have a signed agreement, however working with Jess's web master has been a bit of a one way street since the domain transfer. As in I send an email and then get no response... However, being optimistic and assuming I do get it eventually I do plan to host it in such a way that all existing links to TS will be restored so that the hundreds possibly thousands of cross links and photos that are linked all over the web will function again. It will continue to be available as the invaluable technical reference and history that it has been for years. IE the domain teamswift.net will not redirect straight here, it will take you to the old teamswift site where you will then be redirected here for new content.

Being realistic, teamswift was ailing and plagued by errors etc. It is also horrendously out of date from a technical standpoint, and in general was not a pleasurable user experience anymore. Feel free to disagree on this, but anyone who was trying to use it before it went down will tell you about the issues they had. With this in mind the repository is replacing teamswift as a fresh start for content moving forward, I plan to migrate or merge and cleanup all of the technical how-to, guides, stickies, photos etc from TS to this site. Leaving TS in place as is to age, with some edits to direct visitors and new content here. There has been some concern expressed about alienating previous TS users, however I'm confident I can't do any worse than what has already been done, with the site going up and down repeatedly for weeks at a time and ultimately disappearing altogether for the better part of half a year going on well who knows how long at this point....

Swifterthanu said:
Good job Ivan in the purchase of TS. Are you going to add a Gallery section here like TS had back in the day? I'd love to see complete folders and all like it used to have.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I will see if I can track down what you are referencing and figure it out.
 
as a database programmer in a previous life I can appreciate inheriting a mess. older forum technology can still work well if the database is well maintained and there is enough disk space on the server.

the gallery and folders swifterthanu was referring to is similar to public and personal server space for each member to post their pictures and attachments into albums. There were technical picture galleries also so that instead of attaching reference pictures directly into an individual post, you could upload all your pics into one folder and then reference that image URL in any post. other members could also browse the picture galleries directly though some required you to login first.
 
suzukitom said:
as a database programmer in a previous life I can appreciate inheriting a mess. older forum technology can still work well if the database is well maintained and there is enough disk space on the server.
Yes I agree that it can, but in this case it hasn't been maintained. It would be a huge undertaking to update and fix everything, so I have to pick my battles as I only have limited time and finances to handle everything. So I've decided to devote my time into making the repository into something great instead of fixing/patching, and limping TS along on crutches. All this being theoretical given I don't have the data yet, but I digress.

suzukitom said:
the gallery and folders swifterthanu was referring to is similar to public and personal server space for each member to post their pictures and attachments into albums. There were technical picture galleries also so that instead of attaching reference pictures directly into an individual post, you could upload all your pics into one folder and then reference that image URL in any post. other members could also browse the picture galleries directly though some required you to login first.

Ah I see, we have something similar on the site here already, any images that you upload are available at the bottom of any post you are making in the upload images tab. It has every photo you have ever uploaded and if you open one in a new tab you can take that url and post it anywhere even off site. It's a simple matter of adding the img tags by clicking the button and dragging the image in between them. It's very handy you can post pictures at will anywhere you are on the site without the need to open a new tab to find them. What it doesn't do is provide them all in a gallery for public viewing, I'll look into that, but I will say that the extensions and mods available for the current version of software that we are using is drastically different than what was available on the old TS site. Lots of extensions have not been updated for the latest software, conversely there are many new ones that weren't around back then either. I will look and see what I can find though, the current image extension we are using was one of the best I found. I'll see if I can find something that addresses the gallery specifically.
 
my biggest wish is for the detailed project threads to be either migrated to the ssgtirepository intact or to have Teamswift stabilized enough to allow that project section to continue. a lot of effort went into them and it would be asking a lot for the original posters nd commenters to repost their project threads spanning many years and that's assuming they can even access their pictures on the Teamswift server.

it would be worthwhile analysing the database tables when you get access to Teamswift, to see if data can be cleaned and imported into the ssgtirepository database.

let me know if I can help if and when you decide to look at it.

Cheers
Tom
 
suzukitom said:
my biggest wish is for the detailed project threads to be either migrated to the ssgtirepository intact or to have Teamswift stabilized enough to allow that project section to continue. a lot of effort went into them and it would be asking a lot for the original posters nd commenters to repost their project threads spanning many years and that's assuming they can even access their pictures on the Teamswift server.

it would be worthwhile analysing the database tables when you get access to Teamswift, to see if data can be cleaned and imported into the ssgtirepository database.

let me know if I can help if and when you decide to look at it.

Cheers
Tom

I absolutely agree, and part of what's up in the air, is what can be done once I have it. Since I don't have the database yet at this point it is all just speculation.
 
Bit of bad news to share, I just heard from Jess that the teamswift.net server was canceled and a backup was not created before that happened. He said they may have a backup from 2015 possibly, so he is looking into it...
 
suprf1y said:
Not at all surprised.

I am. :frowning: I have been emailing his web guy all along asking for the site data, so he should have known it would be needed. Jess was just was surprised as me to learn that it was deleted without backing it up. WTF on that one, well he's looking to see if he can find any backup at all, although if he does it's likely to be quite old, as in years old.... So we'll see what happens.
 
Thank you for your effort on the Teamswift.net endevor you went way above anyone could do with your connections

Put a fork in it.
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................................. cause it's Over.!


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........................Gm
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