False Alarm—F295 is back online

[NedL]

Couple days ago the F295 site went dark.
It's wasn't active anymore as a forum, but I still landed there occasionally for reference to useful discussions.

 

[Rick A]

Geez, I haven't visited that site in a couple of years. I suppose I'm partially responsible for their demise, I never subscribed.

 

[Peter Schrager]

Was this the site hosted by the gentleman out of Pittsburgh??? We had a lovely conference there back in the day...

 

[NedL]

Yes, Tom Persinger from Pittsburgh.

I don't think it was so much monetary support, but just that the activity level faded away as people moved to facebook....

I really dislike facebook and stayed away until last year, but finally it seemed like if I wanted to stay in touch w/ friends who make calotypes I'd need to join... which I reluctantly did... but it doesn't seem to me that the "alt process" areas are very active or interesting there either... or maybe I'm not in the right "groups".

 

[winger]

I don't know any other details, but I think there was more to it than just facebook taking over. And, yes, the f295 symposiums in Pittsburgh were great. Hanging out with Art and Peter was fun! In years since, I took workshops on building lenses and on Mordançage. Tom put together really great groups of artists for those.

It's too bad it didn't survive, at least as a resource.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I have not been to the site in years. It was very useful. It will be missed.

 

[Barry Kirsten]

Very sad news indeed. I was very distressed when Tom closed it down, but respected his right to do so. There is nothing like f295 and I suppose never will be. Since it closed I looked in on it from time to time, the last time being a week ago. I don't have anything to do with social media but would certainly join something like Facebook if many of the old f295 members were active there.

 

[henpe]

Sometimes the 'Wayback Machine' can be useful:
Dead Link Removed
Just type 'www.f295.org' in the search field of that site and you will be able to retrieve some snapshots of the old site. Not always 100% of the original functionality, but if lucky you will be able to retrieve what you was looking for...I often find this tool quite useful.

Regards

 

[pdeeh]

or maybe I'm not in the right "groups".

maybe you need a frog avatar and a red hat?

more seriously, I wonder if anyone cloned the site before it closed down? it's easy to do and it would have saved a marvellous resource.
I suppose there's always the internet archive, but that doesn't always save everything unless its a very popular site.

 

[slackercrurster]

Internet...very impermanent.

 

[BrianShaw]

Internet...very impermanent.

... yet whatever goes into the internet will stay forever...

 

[bvy]

Too bad. I was a regular there for a while. Tom lives in my ZIP code, but we never met.

 

[dasBlute]

here's to Tom, Marv, *Sarge*, and a host of other people who influenced and supported the ragtag enthusiasts...
ripples in a pond spreading outward

 

[scheimfluger_77]

+1 on these guys, particularly Sarge. We went to high school together and he is the one who got me into pinhole.

 

[NedL]

False Alarm!
Looks like Tom has renewed his hosting for the F295 site. Thanks to him for keeping a valuable resource online.

Pdeeh: Way back when, I went to archive.org and requested archiving of selected f295 pages, but I didn't see a way to ask them to snapshot the whole site. I also played with a few variations of wget, but didn't find an easy way to deal with the pagination scripts, and didn't pursue it. Now would be a very good time to give that some additional effort....

 

[Peter Schrager]

Someone needs to update the thread title
To f295 lives!!

 

[NedL]

Someone needs to update the thread title
To f295 lives!!

Yes, I already sent in a request to the moderators to change the title to 'False Alarm"... I'll send another one if it doesn't change soon.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Yes, I already sent in a request to the moderators to change the title to 'False Alarm"... I'll send another one if it doesn't change soon.

So did I.

 

[MattKing]

As Did I, except I asked for "IT'S ALIVE"

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

Title updated.

 

[NedL]

Title updated.

Thanks David!

 

[pdeeh]

Pdeeh: Way back when, I went to archive.org and requested archiving of selected f295 pages, but I didn't see a way to ask them to snapshot the whole site. I also played with a few variations of wget, but didn't find an easy way to deal with the pagination scripts, and didn't pursue it. Now would be a very good time to give that some additional effort....

wget should work fine (or curl), but you could also also try one of the other apps tailored for archiving websites - https://www.httrack.com/ is the one I use (Windows and *nix versions available) but a quick DDG should reveal others.

One of the things to remember is to set whatever tool you're using to follow redirects.

In general though, archiving forums is often a bit fraught because the permissions seem to be locked down better than regular websites, plus more modern ones are driven off the back of a database engine and build their pages 'on the fly' as you request them rather than having a static file-and-directory structure.

I'll have a go too when I have a minute/

 

[NedL]

...wget should work fine (or curl), but you could also also try one of the other apps tailored for archiving websites - https://www.httrack.com/ is the one I use (Windows and *nix versions available) but a quick DDG should reveal others....

Yesterday, I started this and it looks like it would probably work okay.

wget --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --html-extension --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows --domains f295.org --no-parent -w 2 www.f295.org/main/forum.php​

I just let it run long enough to see if it looked like it would work... Not sure how much disk space would be needed. Not sure it needs a whole 2 second wait between requests, but some amount of wait is a good idea.

 

[pdeeh]

I tried it with a builtin on my Linux which runs

wget -m -c -k -r -np ​

(I leave it as an exercise for the reader to unpack the options )

Running to completion, I couldn't see any obvious errors, and the total used for the subdir is ~74MB

I also note the robots.txt includes Python-urllib, which seems a bit mean.

 

[AgX]

It is NOT back in the old form!

At least I myself can only see a listing of their past symposions, some interviews and the promotion of their book.
Maybe a few further links on those pages.

To gain an idea what there was have a look at archive.org around 2014. Then you will see at least the thread titles of their forum.