The brilliant thread by Jim McDougall Early Makers Trade Marks has somehow disappeared. This is a vital piece of research information and had reached over 120 thousand hits. This is a cornerstone foundation of knowledge and is the Forum Library representative of stored knowledge for now and the future. Rather like a business institution Library or SEARCH is the very heartbeat of this Forum and is where investment is placed so that others may learn. It is a key strategic and important treatise in everything we do here.

It is requested that this gem of research be placed back in the crown jewels of forum data as presumably this is a temporary dislocation. Congratulations to Jim on crashing through the 120,000 barrier with this most excellent flagship thread.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.


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Absent without leave
 

This thread was not intentionally removed. Apparently, in the course of a moderator attempting to extract relevant portions of it to the EA, the software somehow permanently deleted the entire thread despite system settings disallowing such deletion. The system logs give no clue of how this happened.

I have recovered the first 3 pages from the WayBackWhenMachine (archive.org), but the remaining 8 could not be retrieved. If any member has made personal disk copies of those missing pages, as I recommend for any pages of particular personal importance to a member, I would appreciate receiving copies of them.

Lee,
Thank you so much for your explanation of this situation and the steps which have been taken to find any resolution to this unfortunate incident.
As noted, this thread which I began in 2008, contained much valuable data and contributions by many members who participated in making it so successful. It was clearly highly trafficked by many who sought information concerning markings on European blades and typically using Google, were led to our pages.

Fernando,
As you have noted, Ibrahiim and I are in constant contact privately as we have conducted a great deal of research together on many topics and various arms being studied.
Actually I had thought that this thread was accessed through the CLASSIC THREADS sticky, and that particular thread was in this position in BOTH forums.
As you know, the fact that European blades often occur in ethnographic weapons has been a main criteria for this topic transcending both forums.
Actually both Ibrahiim and I access the thread quite a lot in our common research, just as did many as shown. This topic came to OUR attention when I was working on the query which you had moved from ethnographic to European, and YOU noted the issue, and I mentioned it to Ibrahiim.
Since it was openly mentioned by you in your post, it did not seem a matter that was classified.

I do know a thing or two about data retrieval and Library content but I'm afraid that the whole thing other than apparently a few pages has been wiped out. This is indeed a catastrophe.


In my view constructive ideas and suggestions should be open house and allowed on Forum as for example my suggestion on data backup... and many other constructive points... like for example how difficult it is for non savvy computer members to actually use the device SEARCH... When all that is required are two boxes... Put in what you are looking for and press the Button !!!!

I have many ideas on how it ought to work... e.g. Data retrieval must be enhanced to give automatic hot referencing at the start of every new thread...of I suggest up to 5 References (chosen on hit count)...Automatic algorithm feed takes about point 1 of a second to achieve this...


Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.


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Salaams Lee, Thank You for your post on this matter.

I regret I have no files copied from that thread and have searched but other than a few charts I have been unable to collect any data lost. The only hope may be that on the original machine it may have been sidelined to the retrieval device.(RECYCLE BIN)..I cannot see how it can have been simply jettisoned.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.

See if this works folks: http://web.archive.org/web/201605010...ead.php?t=5453

Took some work, but I think this has content up to 2016.

-Edit-
SIGH...NEVER MIND, I thought all the pages were there but, sadly, no.

Nice try... Regret only the first page is there ... Its a start . That's the machine mentioned by Lee ... but the rest of the detail has vanished.

Page 2 here: http://web.archive.org/web/201605010...3&page=2&pp=30

Excellent support !!

No attachments, though :shrug: .

Recovered material to date
 

Here is a zip archive of what I have been able to recover from the early makers marks thread:
Early Makers Marks

Shayde78's image searches led me to explore caches of other search engines and the archive now consists of:

pages 1 - 3 courtesy of archive.org and including attachments
pages 4 - 6 courtesy of Bing, but without attachments
pages 8 - 9 courtesy of Bing, but without attachments
page 10 courtesy of Google, but without attachments

To view these files:
1) Download the zip file.
2) Extract the contents into an empty directory
3) Directly load the desired html page into your web browser (i.e. right click, open) from the extracted folder.

Notes:
1) You will not see the attachments if you open the html files directly from the zip file.
2) Some links within these documents will not work. You will have to directly open each of the html pages; you cannot navigate between them.
3) Page 7 was overwritten on Google and Yahoo's cache times out; there is no trace of page 11 but I still have another place to look.

--> If you have your own saved disk file of parts of this thread that are not included, please forward them to me and I'll include them in the zip file.

--> If you recognize missing images from this thread in shayde78's links or in your own archive, please either attach to this current thread or e-mail them to me (ljones@vikingsword.com) and I'll add them to this archive. Be sure to indicate which post the image is from; this is shown on the right of the bar with the post date and time.

If you do an image search like this :
or here

you can at least see some of the images that were lost. Sadly, you cannot view the page/accompanying text.

Moving thread to European forum, as per request and also to more adequate location of discussed topic; and thread title changed to "Lost thread", to prevent software conflicting with the original title.


,

Thank you very much Fernando.

Excellent work !!...That looks like most of the images ... Jim please review these images we appear top have it all...courtesy of some very switched on work by shayde78 ...and also by Lee who seems to have much of the text...

The old thread is now partly restored; by manual means, that not by informatic abilities. All posts recaptured were copy/pasted to the old topic and all available attachments were saved/uploaded into respective posts; eventually some that were lost were spotted and also brought in.
It may be found HERE
As already advanced by Dr. Lee Jones, all material still missing and eventually retrieved by members will be welcome and imediately added to the thread.
This will remain in a sticky mode for a while; then with time being, it will be unstuck and follow its natural course.
Meanwhile, the thread is open and reply features are available.

Thank you.

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