Archives

[justjohn]

I don't know about you but I miss the Spyderco Archives. I am the proud owner of over 100 Spyderco Knives and I used to like browsing the archives. This may sound weird but I likened it to lookin through a family photo album. Oh well; as George Harrison once said, "All things must pass".

[Evil D]

Unfortunately there's going to come a point where a lot of pictures are lost from the Internet, once sites like Photobucket close accounts where pics have been hosted. I have a LOT that are going to get screwed up.

Then there are others like The Deacon who had his own site or server, and all of the info he had there will be gone if/when those sites are closed. Same with Cliff Stamp and the forum he had.

[rycen]

Are you referring to a specific place or speaking in general?

[justjohn]

Spyderco Online Archive

[RustyIron]

Unfortunately there's going to come a point where a lot of pictures are lost from the Internet, once sites like Photobucket close accounts where pics have been hosted.

Yup, you're spot on. I couldn't begin to list the number of photo storage web sites that have changed their business model, resulting in the loss of users' photographs. I just asked ChatGPT and Gemini, and they told me a bunch. The one thing they both had in common was the advice to have multiple backups of your data.

That's why, unless there are extenuating circumstances, you will never see me post an image to The Forum with an external link. If I share a picture, I upload it to The Forum. It's for the long-term continuity of The Forum. File storage may cost Sal an extra hundred bucks a month, but I try and even it up by buying knives from him.

[Larry_Mott]

I wasn't aware you could upload images to the forum? How do you do that?

[Larry_Mott]

Sorry double tap due to temporarily lost internet connection..

[RustyIron]

I wasn't aware you could upload images to the forum? How do you do that?

[Larry_Mott]

You live and learn, still.. after 64 years on this earth :)
Thanks man!

[Evil D]

Are you referring to a specific place or speaking in general?

Not sure if you were asking me this but I think a little of both. They say once it's on the Internet it's there forever, and that may be true to some extent but if a hosting site goes down or even just closes the account that pictures are being hosted for them anywhere that those pics are shared is going to lose them. We have to assume that no website/company is going to last forever so eventually Photobucket/Flickr/Imgur etc die off and all those hosting links die with them. The only way to save all that would be to save it directly to the forum database by uploading it here, but then that's also asking the forum to handle the load of data that comes with it which isn't free.

I've already seen this happen, years ago lots of us used Cardomain which was like a car oriented Myspace, and lots of pics where linked from that site and when it went down all the links died with it.

I've moved over to a paid Flickr account just to hopefully have a more permanent solution, but if I stop paying them my account closes and all my uploads go away.

[aicolainen]

They say once it's on the Internet it's there forever, and that may be true to some extent

It's quite ironic, but yeah... once the link between the forum/resource site and the picture is broken, it doesn't really matter how many duplicates of the picture exists out there.

I agree with Rusty, that the preferred solution is to have media storage integrated into the forum solution. And with that said, I wasn't aware that this forum had that option either. So like @Larry_Mott I learned something today.

It would be cool if there one day could be standardized indexing feature for images and maybe other media, so the internet in the future could be less dependent on hard links. We'll see. The internet is so young and already so fragmented and messy... and with AI and deep fakes that will only accelerate if no mitigating technologies are implemented.

[cabfrank]

I do the same as Mr. Iron, and post images to the forum, or don't post them at all.
Larry, don't feel bad. It took me a LONG time to realize I could resize the pics so they weren't too big to post.