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Where Is Our Missing Persons Thread? (People Who Just Disappear)

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The massive old compendium thread entitled "People Who Just Disappear" ... ... just disappeared.

That's not a joke; I'm not kidding.

It happened during the evening of 8 June 2019 @ circa 2030 EDT. The back (later / newer) end of the 60-some page thread was being incrementally dismantled to spin off case-specific threads on disappearances for which there'd been substantial discussions (some spanning years).

Circa half the then-massive thread (some 30-odd pages) had been whittled down and spun off into case-specific threads.

For example, the Margaret Fleming thread (which still survives):

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-disappearance-of-margaret-fleming.65950/

... was one of the last chunks to be spun off before digital disaster struck.

There was a sudden chaotic "jitterbug" disruption in my screen display, after which the forum failed to recognize the existence of the original thread. Immediate measures failed to surface any trace of the thread, admin logs mysteriously indicated it had been deleted, and tech support was urgently contacted to see if it could be located and retrieved before the next database update.

Unfortunately, it was gone.

To this day, and after considerable research on relevant software / database mechanics, there remains no explanation for how the older circa 30-odd pages of that venerable thread simply blipped out of existence all at once. Some sort of catastrophic database glitch must have been triggered on the server side - most probably involving bad / corrupted internal links that had migrated across who-knows-how-many platform and software transitions.

The bottom line is that the thread for "People Who Just Disappear" just disappeared.

Thank you, Cosmic Joker ... Cue the theremin ...
 
The original thread may have been one of mine, with the ellipsis intended to represent a sort of open-handed shrugging 'Search me!' gesture.
We didn't have anything like that back then. Do we now?

(This doesn't mean 'Please bring back the Closet Man', in case that's not clear.)
 
OK. I've found it on the Internet Wayback machine. It dates back to Dec 8 2001, and the first post was by swelle. That post no longer exists - though interestingly swelle is still on the records despite not having posted in over a decade - however the second and third posts, by James Whitehead and naitaka both still exist, but are in different threads altogether dedicated to the subject of their posts, respectively Ambrose Bierce and Benjamin Bathurst.

My hypothesis - the threads were spilt, different posts hived off into different threads, and (I've done this myself) two tabs each with the same page on them, but one is updated and the other still showing the original page. Looking at one lulls you into thinking all is well. Click delete on the wrong one... this would explain why the first post is gone, and any remaining thread appended to it would go too.

The archive version is here:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015090...x.php?threads/people-who-just-disappear.1575/
..so we have access to much of the data. If anyone knows a way of painlessly importing it, let me know.
 
stu neville said:
OK. I've found it on the Internet Wayback machine. It dates back to Dec 8 2001, and the first post was by swelle. That post no longer exists - though interestingly swelle is still on the records despite not having posted in over a decade - however the second and third posts, by James Whitehead and naitaka both still exist, but are in different threads altogether dedicated to the subject of their posts, respectively Ambrose Bierce and Benjamin Bathurst. ...
Click to expand...

The posts still evident in the Bierce and Bathurst threads were copied out of the MIA mega-thread days before the disappearance incident and edited to fit in establishing / augmenting separate threads. JW's, swelle's (and any other) "original" post remained in the mega-thread.

Copying posts elsewhere has no effect on the persistence of a thread.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The posts still evident in the Bierce and Bathurst threads were copied out of the MIA mega-thread days before the disappearance incident and edited to fit in establishing / augmenting separate threads. JW's, swelle's (and any other) "original" post remained in the mega-thread.

Copying posts elsewhere has no effect on the persistence of a thread.
Click to expand...
Exactly - I've previously copied threads to cannibalise, stripped out and rehomed posts, etc etc, and then accidentally destroyed the original intact one. The facsimilie posts are then all that remain.
 
stu neville said:
... My hypothesis - the threads were spilt, different posts hived off into different threads, and (I've done this myself) two tabs each with the same page on them, but one is updated and the other still showing the original page. Looking at one lulls you into thinking all is well. Click delete on the wrong one... this would explain why the first post is gone, and any remaining thread appended to it would go too. ...
Click to expand...

That's a viable hypothesis, but it's certainly not what happened in this case.

The mega-thread wasn't split or duplicated in any sense, because all maneuvers were done at the post level of granularity. There weren't any multiple copies of the mega-thread in play at the time, there were no thread-level maneuvers attempted, and I never use tabs.

The disappearance occurred in the immediate wake of moving circa 25 posts from deep within the mega-thread, and it was coincident with the mysterious screen chaos event. Whatever killed the mega-thread involved the whatever-it-was disruption and not the moving of the posts per se.

The only post-level maneuver that can delete a thread is to move or delete post #1. The mega-thread's post #1 hadn't been selected since it was copied to set up the new Bathurst thread some 3(?) days earlier. That copy action deactivated the selection upon execution, as evidenced by the fact the mega-thread persisted for another 3 days before the disappearance incident with multiple moves being done against it in the mean time.
 
I'm interested in the mysterious screen chaos event. Was it your whole screen or confined to the FTMB window?
 
stu neville said:
The archive version is here:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015090...x.php?threads/people-who-just-disappear.1575/
..so we have access to much of the data. If anyone knows a way of painlessly importing it, let me know.
Click to expand...

Yes, the state of the lost thread as of 2015 is preserved at the Wayback Machine. However ...

The preserved version is the presentation derived from the database, and not the database data per se. The client-side presentation has been stripped of the internal database connections or attributions that would permit it to be imported using the available import widgets. Phrased another way ... You might be able to import the database's internal records (and record structures) associated with that particular thread alone, but you can't "import" (in the same sense) the client-side presentation distilled from those internal records. In yet other words - the client-side presentation would have to be deconstructed and translated into a simulacrum of what the forum's database held at the time of that last 2015 capture.

I researched this problem at the time, and I found no reasonable means for accomplishing such a deconstruction / translation / simulation, even if the result could be imported without damaging or disrupting member / post / thread records on the receiving end.
 
James_H said:
I'm interested in the mysterious screen chaos event. Was it your whole screen or confined to the FTMB window?
Click to expand...

It was the whole screen - everything; all windows. My initial impression was that it was a transient power glitch (drop-out; brownout), but my power backup unit hadn't been tripped and the non-disruption of other quite power-sensitive devices demonstrated there'd been no power loss.

And yes, the power supply on the computer I was using was checked out and found to be fine.

The screen chaos occurred in response to refreshing the webpage from which the last batch of posts had been moved - further indicating it probably represented something screwy with the server-side transmission (response) or the net connection itself.
 
EnolaGaia said:
It was the whole screen - everything; all windows. My initial impression was that it was a transient power glitch (drop-out; brownout), but my power backup unit hadn't been tripped and the non-disruption of other quite power-sensitive devices demonstrated there'd been no power loss.

And yes, the power supply on the computer I was using was checked out and found to be fine.

The screen chaos occurred in response to refreshing the webpage from which the last batch of posts had been moved - further indicating it probably represented something screwy with the server-side transmission (response) or the net connection itself.
Click to expand...
Very strange. What kind of system are you using? I can't imagine anything like that affecting the display.
 
James_H said:
... I can't imagine anything like that affecting the display.
Click to expand...

It can if the incoming HTML coding is corrupted or anomalous enough to make either the browser or the graphic engine choke. It's also conceivable that an aborted data transmission choked the browser, which in turn choked the graphic / display engine.
 
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