Pied Piper Project

As of a week ago, PPP4 achieved a state of synchronization with the board by catching up on the 1.5 years since PPP3 (and incidentally loading a lot of overhead by recopying everything that had been copied in PPP3 and not deleted since). Now that the Piperbot is up to the current content of the board, it will try to stay on top of it by regularly finding new posts.

My long and arduous journey in becoming a Drupal Wizard can be measured in how little code I have to reinvent. Back in May 2006, when I first began using Drupal, I had so little understanding of the engine that I actually had to hack the path aliasing system to make my own path "menu" API. This klutz of a page (the Grand Endeavor) was finally shut down late in 2006 when I integrated my Drupal sites into a unique code base and had to throw out these dirty hacks - and now the site employs the API properly. The PPP was redesigned as a Drupal site only in November 2006.

All right. PPP4 is currently running. It is at the time of this writing finishing up the spidering of Technical Support (strictly speaking a highly useless task, since Tech Support never got purged, and thus all of the old topics are already in PPP3). It is approximately 18% done with the whole board. For now, PPP4 consists merely of making a complete re-archiving of all topics that currently exist. Since nearly a year and a half have passed since PPP3, quite a lot of new data comes in.

The file cache has been moved out of the modules directory and into the files directory. Unfortunately, I haven't updated the modules accordingly and have no time to do it now either.

In theory, this should have broken the entire site, but fortunately all topics have been parser-cached already, so the filecache is mostly redundant.

What you will notice is that icons and emoticons are broken. This will be fixed soon, right after the Endeavor is back.