Pied Piper Project

As you can see from the parser status, the post parser is very close to being done now. The heavy post-crunching (triggered the first time somebody reads the topic) was done not by human visitors, but by a quite indiscriminate wget unleashed on the site (from its own server, naturally). Note that the figure is somewhat inaccurate, as I've found out a few of the topic lengths don't actually reflect the number of posts actually existing.

Isn't that annoying? You're browsing through a part deep in the middle of the forum pages, read a topic, then click the forum link in the breadcrumb trail to get back to the forum...

And land on page 1, having to go back to the page you were on with several clicks.

On a forum, this is common practice, and the trick is to use the back button on your browser to get back to the next thread. And you're probably not reading that far back - why didn't the admin yet prune the old topics, anyway?

Print Parser is a small step on the road to achieving the total completeness of these archives.

The unfortunate truth is that some topics didn't get saved in time.

Not on the announced purges, of course. Jeff always gives us plenty of time to save topics before they get pruned. I am referring to small in-between deletions - for example; Valley of Thunder and the PPP2 Announcement topic fell victim to this only a week before I finished Magic Flute in January. Stareye was apologetic, but I never found all of PPP2.

Mighty Parser and Print Parser are two new features used on the backend of this site. As you probably know, the PPP archives consist entirely of flat html files in ordered directories - even though the pages are now parsed and the results saved in the database, so we're moving away from the files.

PPP3 is easy to process. I saved it entirely with a program I called Magic Flute, and the resulting html files are uniform in format.

The Pied Piper Project has just had another upgrade that makes it more powerful.