Help verify that old news imports correctly!

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I've been working with a coder on importing our old news archives and we're in the final stages now, so I need some more eyes to check with me if anything else is still off.

What I need you to do is to compare our old news archives and the imported news & comments at http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=102

The format of the imported news is not exactly identical as in the original, but it's close enough for our needs.

Please note:
- not all the news has been imported currently but only a few months for testing purposes
- comments are not imported with proper timestamps but simply in the order they were posted with a few minutes between them to space them out. If anyone finds a problem with this method, let me know why it's a problem!

What you should be on the lookout for:
- basically anything that doesn't match the source content: be it missing comments, incorrectly imported news or comments, broken/incorrect quote separator blocks, etc.

Any questions? Let me know!

 

Looks good to me from the sampling I viewed.

 

I went to a random entry in November 2001 and could not find it in the imported area. Maybe I'm just a spaz.

What I looked at and could not find (Link):

November 2001

PoR Interview at Gamespot UK
Posted Friday, November 30, 2001 - 22:09 CET by Mollusken

Gamespot UK has interviewd Pool of Radiance associate producer Chuck Yager. It is mostly a summary of features that should have been in the game, and how the game didn't turn out to be exactly as they wanted.

GS: What made you decide to go for turn-based combat, rather than real-time combat as in games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Diablo?

CY: We wanted to bring the player back to the good old days of the Gold Box games with the feel of the gameplay. Therefore, turn based combat was a perfect way to do this. Also, we felt at the time (and still do) that turn based combat opens up a whole array of options to users with the D&D rules that real time has a much more difficult time implementing.

GS: Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is the first game to use the Third Edition AD&D rules. How difficult was it to transfer these new rules from the tabletop to the computer?

CY: It was not too difficult to transfer the 3E rules from paper to the computer because of some of the changes that occurred in 3rd Edition. However, what WAS hard was changing over from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition in the middle of the project. Looking back, it made the development cycle that much harder, but the upshot was that we got the first 3E game out there on the shelves and were able to offer players a look into the new rules. If there's a next game on the horizon for us and D&D I'm sure it will be that much more ingrained with 3E.

Read the whole interview here.


(As you might expect from a 14 year old link embedded in the news post, it did not point to what it used to point to.)

 

Yea, I mentioned in my post that we don't have all the news imported right now but only a sampling of a few months. So you need to find a news piece that's been imported and then compare it to the full archive and not the other way around, as it likely won't be there.

 

Oh, you expected me to read . . .

Silly, silly.

Anyway, I checked a few that were imported and they looked reasonably accurate to my eye.

 

Thanks, there are a lot of different types of news pieces so the more that we can look at, the more likely it is that we'll find anything off. Once the import is done, we'll have what we have and anything off will need to be fixed manually or left as it is, whereas now the importer can still be adjusted.

 

Yes; NewsPro is an account I created solely for the purpose of importing said news archives from our old NewsPro news script. It's a system account that all the news posts and comments were imported under, not an actual user. The moving to XF thread has more info on the final stages of the import, which is complete now.

 

The activity data would likely need to be rebuilt to show properly, but since we're only days away from switching to XenForo, it's not worth spending the time on TBH.