topic Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents! in BreakPoint

The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

altenbach — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 19:44:34 GMT

So I was trying to find some links to the old LabVIEW coding challenges, and for some reason many of the links (description & results) are no longer present.

Only two out of the original 22 links are still present (<10%!!!!). That's not good.

What happened?????

... no wonder that page now has a rating of 1 (1 vote). Wasn't me though. In fact the third challenge was about FFT and is not even mentioned, but I don't think it got any entries. Still, it should be listed.)

I hope somebody at NI can search through old backups and assemeble all these documents.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

altenbach — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:16:42 GMT

Was just looking at my ancient factorial challenge entry. It calculates all 35660 (note that the first google result shows an incorrect digit number 35659) digits of 10000! in about 8ms on my current laptop and, looking at the code, I already see some possible optimizations. 😄

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

X. — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:33:44 GMT

One of the links on the page you reference is broken.

Searching for "challenge" and the actual challenge names on the webiste returns these other disappointing pages:

Prime Factor Coding Challenge

Financial Planner Champion (broken links there too)

The should indeed be some interesting code examples in there...

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

tst — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 07:36:52 GMT

At least some of this (including files) is on the earliest version here, but not all - http://web.archive.org/web/20130429135709/http://www.ni.com/white-paper/5174/en

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

LiliMcDonald — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:26:34 GMT

Thanks for pointing this out. We're following up internally to find out what happened and if we can get the content restored.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 15:22:55 GMT

Please do.

I placed 3rd in the Dictionary challenge and lacking a page to prove it, I would just be blowing smoke.

Besides the post-mortem write-ups of the solution were good reference material.

Ben

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

JÞB — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 20:54:01 GMT

@Ben wrote:
Please do.

I placed 3rd in the Dictionary challenge and lacking a page to prove it, I would just be blowing smoke.

Besides the post-mortem write-ups of the solution were good reference material.

Ben

Yes, the interweb is a good source! Nice to see you.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Hassan_Atassi — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 16:50:01 GMT

Thanks for your feedback about the documents that are no longer available on ni.com. However, what you are seeing is intentional. In an effort to increase findability and search relevancy of our website (which many of you have also provided feedback about), over the past year we have been working to clean out old documents that are no longer deemed useful to the majority of our users. We use a combination of web analytics and expert opinion to help us determine what content to retire, and the pages referenced in this thread are over ten years old and get very minimal traffic.

That being said, I understand how these pages can be valuable to some of you, at the very least as bragging rights about your winning! I have talked to our community team, and we have agreed that for any future competitions we will dedicate a specific area of the Community to house and maintain an archive of the results and winners. Unfortunately, the pages you all are referring to here have already been removed from our internal content management system, and this there is no way to retrieve them. However, I will be able to send an award certificate to anyone who may need one to prove their winning.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

altenbach — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 17:26:40 GMT

Thanks for the update. Site searchability is a gigantic problem and cannot be solved by deleting old documents. Google can do it!

Over the years, I had numerous posts here linking to the various coding challenges, and they were always hard to find by searching. So it was probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you make these pages hard to find, and then you are eliminating them for too little traffic. 😞 Apparently all my links did not help.

It also looks weird to have that landing page with all the link missing. Maybe somebody could add a red paragraph apologizing for the missing documents to make it clear that NI is aware of things.

Searching the site is still a complete crapshot. I was just trying to find the LabVIEW 2015 help page for "scale by power of two" and it seems impossible to find unless I search for "scale by power of 2", which gives me the 2013 version (why???). Going back to "scale by power of 2 2015" finally gives me the lastest version. Whiy does it need to be so difficult?

I wonder if somebody is interested helping create a community document where we collect the remaining bits (e.g. from the wayback machine and personal notes, etc.) of the old challenges. We could call it the "coding challenge museum". 😄

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 18:07:14 GMT

I have to ditto Christians comments about a self fullfilling prophy.

Please send the the certificate you mentioned.

I put a lot of effort into the code I submitted and if I have to settle for a cretificate to indicate that I was the third place finisher (AHEAD OF ALL NI developed soultions ) I will have to be happy with that.

I belive Bruce Ammons placed #2 ahead of me and I am drawing a blank on the name (maybe a Konstantin?) of the person that placed first.

And for the record, I consider the decision to remove and delete was a very bad idea.

Ben

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

tst — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 09:07:18 GMT

While my interest in those specific documents is practically zero, I definitely agree with the others that deleting old content is a bad move in general, and I particularly disagree with the "clean out old documents that are no longer deemed useful to the majority of our users" concept. Even if the documents are not useful for the majority of the users, I think the onus is still on NI to at least keep existing links working and also to think about the minority of the users who will find the documents useful. This isn't just relevant to coding challenges, but to all content.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 13:33:16 GMT

Yes, in the modern era of electronic sharing of info, deleting old posting and contributions is similar to buring old books just because nobody has checked them out recently. Libraries maintain "stacks" for old books that are not read often.

The implications for the community are also affected by this stand to delete old stuff.

Some of us (well maybe just me) have this crazy idea that their contributions will out live them and serve the developers of tommorow.

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

Ben

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Hooovahh — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 14:08:50 GMT

@Ben wrote:

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

What if every post in the forums with zero kudos was deleted after some amount of time? I realize NI probably tries to gauge what is useful to users other than just a kudo count, but still I think the comparison is apt.

Well if you're ever looking for another LabVIEW community to share and help with there's always the largest independent LabVIEW community over on LAVA We've only ever had one large purge in our history that I know of, and it was due to a big server crash, where the way to recover the majority of the data, was through a program that went through someones backed up RSS feed, and reposted the content.

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 15:04:06 GMT

@Hooovahh wrote:
@Ben wrote:

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?
What if every post in the forums with zero kudos was deleted after some amount of time? I realize NI probably tries to gauge what is useful to users other than just a kudo count, but still I think the comparison is apt.

Well if you're ever looking for another LabVIEW community to share and help with there's always the largest independent LabVIEW community over on LAVA We've only ever had one large purge in our history that I know of, and it was due to a big server crash, where the way to recover the majority of the data, was through a program that went through someones backed up RSS feed, and reposted the content.

Prior to that Michael pulled a stunt where he was claiming that LAVA was going to be shutdown. I imediately went to every post in the scripting thread and saved everyone to my machine.

Ben

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

X. — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 21:27:26 GMT

I think NI's move should be commended. Think of all the space that could be recovered in libraries if we followed the same guidelines...

There are so many Middle Age calligraphed manuscripts that nobody ever bothers to read, ancient works of science from time immemorial which almost nobody can decipher, literature work of evil, crazy or plain fanatical men and women, etc... Let's clean the whole thing up!

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Hooovahh — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 22:52:55 GMT

@X. wrote:
I think NI's move should be commended.

I think you forgot this

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:47:19 GMT

If they wanted to save space, just use a smaller font.

Be thankful they were not the people that found the rotsetta stone.

Ben

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Hooovahh — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:42 GMT

@Ben wrote:

Be thankful they were not the people that found the rotsetta stone.

Or maybe they were, but all record of their discover was lost

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Matt_McLaughlin — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:18:48 GMT

@Ben wrote:

The implications for the community are also affected by this stand to delete old stuff.

Some of us (well maybe just me) have this crazy idea that their contributions will out live them and serve the developers of tommorow.

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

Ben

Hi Ben,

I wanted to quickly jump in on this comment.

We will not simply remove content that community members have contributed. In cases of SPAM or inappropriate conduct, we contact users directly notifying them that the content was remove, often "archiving" the content in case of error (the only exception being obviously bot-generated SPAM). If at any point in the future community content needs to be moved or altered, we will communicate that well in advance.

I believe the mixup here is that the removed content pre-dated our Community system, was categorized as an NI managed tutorial (presumably the best options available at the time), and was treated by automated tools as such.

I know this is a bit of an aside to the conversation about this specific document, but I wanted to make sure that point was clarified.

Moving forward, I would love it if we could have a more formalized, regular Coding Contest process hosted on the Community with some sort of archive/hall-of-fame for past winners.

Thanks,

Re: The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

Ben — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:39:23 GMT

It is good to hear that we can nip that idea in the bud.

Thank you.

Ben