[grassle]

I apologize for the essantially double posting, but I hope someone will still read this.




The links in #1 of http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15378 only return a "Page not found". (May also be the case elsewhere.)



Why is that?

There were some great things to show the kids of today. And maybe in a few years folks want to redo stuff with their grandkids. The Minis are fine machines for that because they are so accessible and not too miniaturized. And nice for little fingers.

If the the Forum wants to save on disk space, please enable all pages temporarily, enter the site in the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine) and wait until it has harvested all pages, THEN you may take the good stuff offline.


Please.

[holmes4]

There has been no attempt to remove content by the forum owners. What has happened here is that the "SEO" links with keywords no longer work. You'll need to go to the forum sections and find the threads you want. They should be all there.

[grassle]

That's sad.
It was a community I fondly remember.

All that would be necessary is a one-time work using a regular expression on the source: Search

(<a href="http://www\.mydellmini\.com/forum/)([^/]+/)([0-9]+)-(.*)(\.html")( target="_blank">)(.*)(</a><br />)

and replace with

\1showthread.php?t=\3\6\4\8

Links will look slightly less elegant, but the functionality is restored. Should be less loss of traffic than the current frustrating pseudolinks. The clickable text could be improved somewhat by replacing "-" with " " and applying Title Case.

No money, no time, no intern to torture, not enough coffee?


EDIT: the regex needs some refinement.

[holmes4]

I don't own this forum, I am just the sole remaining administrator, hanging on because of my history with the Mini 9 (which I have now given to a niece, so I don't have it anymore.) It is a volunteer effort.

I'm not really interested in cleaning up anything. The posts are there if you care to look for them, though a lot of external file links are dead (as are some of the internal file links, for reasons I don't understand.)

I would recommend capturing anything you want now, as it may disappear at any time. I've had to rescue it from the dead more than once. The Mini 9 is 12 years old at this point, and I doubt there are many that are still functional. The Mini 10s may fare a bit better, but they too are long in the tooth. I have no idea when the forum owner will decide to stop paying for hosting.

[grassle]

Hi, Steve,


I didn't know that was a volunteer position, I thought it a part of Dell's PR, and paid staff maintaining the site.

So, on behalf of all who enjoyed modding the Mini 9, thank you for the fun and good times you and your co-mods have enabled us to have!


And now I'll set up a downloader.


Hat tip from one veteran to another,



Goodby
grassle

[holmes4]

Dell does not run this site, and never has. It was started by a user, and then sold to someone else who has been hands-off.

[darknessblade]

Sadly the site is slowly DYING out, there have been almost no new or active users in a long long time

Neither Homes or i know when the site will stop working.

Based on information of Whois,domain tools
https://whois.domaintools.com/mydellmini.com

The forum could be removed in a few months. since that is the time the current name registration ends.

If the original owner chooses to extend the domain, it might stay for Yet another Year.
Since most domain contracts are from Year to Year basis.

[holmes4]

There's the domain registration (cheap) and the hosting (maybe not so cheap?)