Open Minds forum no longer exists.

[calikid]

[spacemaverick]

Now that just cracks me up calikid. I gotta find some emoticons like that!

[dove]

You people are unbelievable. You say that you're open to discussing this matter and then when someone with several valid points comes on here to discuss them, you treat them as if she were a leper and tell her she's beating a dead horse. All the while supporting someone who does his best to deflect and redirect the conversation so he doesn't have to answer the hard questions. I see nothing much has changed. How unfortunate. For you and your new forum, that is.


@ Spacemaverick

I think your post has hurt me tonight more than anything. I thought you had respect for me and knew that I'm out here on the net to help people. Do you really think that my views are so invalid as to say such a thing to/about me? Do you also think that I shouldn't have replied to all those posts directed at me today?

Did you see my reply to your farewell post at OM? I explained that your threads were likely just moved, as so many of the others were. You didn't ever say which threads you think it was that were deleted or I would have hunted them down for you just as I did for Ed and Pappy. There was no excuse for bren to move those threads around. I am not here to justify his actions.

How do you think I feel about all of this happening? I spent the vast majority of my time and energy in the last 3 1/2 years at that forum, spending hundreds and hundreds of hours posting things to help people. The only person with more posts there than me was Jake (and maybe ivo). And now it's all gone? Nobody else will benefit from that information that I so carefully put out there for people? Do you realize what a blow this is to me?

I'm more than upset at everyone who is responsible for its downfall and I think I have every right to be. They know in their hearts who they are and I hope they're happy now. Maybe it wasn't the intention, but maybe it was. I guess we'll never know since so many people have been in the habit of lying or not telling the whole truth.

We know by Ed's admission (see quote below) that his intent was to bring down OM. That he didn't care if it survived or not. Clearly the intention was there for him. He knew what he was doing and most definitely was out for revenge. Well, excuse me for beating the dead horse, but that was just wrong. After all the times he has called people like Lear and Lazar a bunch of liars, you'd think he'd be able to take a little of what he's dished out so much. There is no excuse for his behavior, IMO.

Whether you or I or anyone else objects, OMF is going down. So it is suggested you save your best old posts. When they accused Bigpappy (aka Danny B) and I (Edgar Fouche) of lying, we both posted complaints to Proboards.

...

So after there were 9 complaints to Proboards, I filed my complaint tonight. i don't care if OMF survives or not. But there is some crazy stuff going on there and if they are calling me and Bigpappy a liar with no proof, we're going to complain. Ed Fouche

~~~

Whatever, guys. You go on with your lives and feel free to continue insulting me or my honest intentions of wanting to be impartial and get to the bottom of things. Keep diverting and deflecting away from the real issues. It matters not to me. As Nib would say: I wash my hands of you all. If someone addresses me or if I think that you're treating me unfairly again, I'll respond. Otherwise I wish you farewell. If I'm banned from here for making my honest observations and for asking legitimate questions, look for your replies at amkon.

[Doc]

Everyone has had an opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings at length. This thread is closed. It will be reopened when things calm down.

[murmur]

I'm glad to see this thread was restored.

The OMF data base was restored as well.

Cy has reopened a new OMF.

It's pretty much hosted just for Dan as near as I can tell.

It's very sad

[Fore]

Here is a portable OMF database:

LINK REMOVED, NO LONGER ACTIVE. by mod

Hash Key: (vohinabedogu)
Compressed size: 203mb
Extracted size: 3.46GB
Volume type: Solid Archive

You'll need winrar in order to extract it. The default location is C: drive. The way to open the archive is to go to the extracted directory and click on index.html. From there you should be able to navigate through the copy from your own webbrowser.

Unfortunately CY's copies seem to be largely incomplete and seem to only have 5 pages of depth in threads while only having crawled the first page of threads with respect to each forum section.

This is not complete as Bren started moving threads around which confused the crawler so the crawling had to stop, otherwise there would be a full copy. It also "mysteriously" kept crashing everytime it reached thread 1953 (My encounters thread).

[calikid]

4gigs compressed into 200megs?
Wow, that winRar does some nice squishing!

[Fore]

I forgot to add the link to WinRaR:

http://www.win-rar.com/download.html?&L=0

@ Calikid

Yeah, when compressing the archive I had to go and learn what the difference is between Solid Archives and Volume Archives. Apparently a solid archive is super efficient but requires that you extract the entire contents in order to pull out any single file. While Volumes Archives are less efficient but afford the easy access to any individual file without fully extracting the entire archive.

Unfortunately, if you want to see only one file, you'd have to wait until the whole archive is extracted directly unto your Hard Drive. It was a tradeoff for sheer download size. It is also better (IMO) to have a local copy burned to a DVD or accessed from a Hard Drive than to rely on free web hosting. This copy can still be hosted online but you would have to use the Teleport VLX software to port it automatically to some web hoster online, cd format, or some other type of access point.

[ScaRZ]

Thanks Fore for posting a portable OMF database.

[Neuru]

Just to (possibly at least) let loose a few people's anticipation and feel its burden weigh down on me, I'll just announce right now that for some time I've been in the process of making a program that should make browsing the OMF archive very, very easy, and quick. Unless something eliminates me, expect a preview release sometime in the next 7 days. (Of course, it might, just might, be the next 8 or 9 or even 14 days but I'll try to stick to the first possibility.)

The preview release is planned to have post bookmarking, post filtering (by author), full text search, note-taking and tabbed browsing capability and it should work with the Open Minds Forum archive's printable versions. In subsequent versions, I'll also add support for threads downloaded from other forums (eventually support for user-defined templates to process any forum of your choice), support for post tagging, advanced filtering and probably many bug fixes. Plus additional modules about which I'll keep quiet for now.

It should be helpful for several things and agendas, be it simple reading (should be more comfortable than reading in a plain browser), finding correlations, synthesis, critical analysis, debunking, de-debunking or research (you know, because the scientific community takes stuff written on internet forums as serious scientific evidence of the utmostest seriosity *smirks* ).