Thread: Early Posts Unavailable

I've been an SRP member since 24 November 2006, but I cannot find-and-access any of my posts prior to Monday, 23 December 2013. What happened to them?

(they weren't political... mostly SOTD posts; nevertheless...)

My guess would be they purge every so often to free up server space. But that's just a guess. Maybe Ivan may be able to help you?

No, posts are never purged.

There have been periods when we lost posts. I remember in the past when servers went down and backups were lost and we lost a very large number of posts.

I can go on forums and see posts going backs a very long time.

Yea, maybe Ivan will chime in on this.

Experiment: In Advanced Search I set Search in Forum(s) to Search All Open Forums and changed Sort Results by from (the default) in Descending Order to in Ascending Order.

Using Sort Results by: in Ascending Order, the first-displayed post (Page 1) was 11-30-2006, and the last-displayed post (Page 19) was 07-24-2013.

Using Sort Results by: in Descending Order, the first-displayed post (Page 1) was 04-23-2022, and the last-displayed post (Page 19) was 03-20-2020.

IOW, there's a gap of six years and eight months (07-24-2013 to 03-20-2020), equivalent to quite a lot of posts.

So, not "Solved", but perhaps a better perspective. IIUC, there's probably a default setting for the maximum number of posts/pages returned in a search [Gugi: hardwired? site/admin configurable?], which limits how far back/how many search results are displayed.

I think this is your first post on SRP

As to how search works I am not quite that smart

https://sharprazorpalace.com/worksho...out-blade.html


Have you tried not using search and just rolling back through your posts ???

All the posts are there, the only gap as far as I know is in late 2007 (or may be 2008) when after a crash someone restored from a 3 month old backup.
From what I see you're getting 19 pages of results in either sort and that's just not enough to include all of your 2200+ posts. I have never seen this number in the settings so it is possible it's hard-coded.