Bonsaitalk, risen from the dead...kind of

[jeanluc83]

October is a good month for necromancy. I was recently poking around the internet wayback machine and came across the archives of bonsaitalk. It's not complete and most of the pictures are missing but there is a lot there worth reading.

I was a member back in the day but I couldn't find any of my old posts. That might not be a bad thing though.

Quite a few familiar names there.

@Smoke, @Bonsai Nut
50th birthday wishes

@Vance Wood, @Walter Pall
Mugo country

 

[Bonsai Nut]

I've tried to contact the owner. I was interested in resurrecting the old bonsai wiki. No response. This was a couple of years ago. Now I'm not so sure where the content resides, or if it is even in a format that would be easy to import (versus just recreating it from scratch).

One thing I make sure of is that the bonsainut database is always redundantly backed up, as well as archived on a regular basis... just in case something happens to the site software.

 

[jeanluc83]

From the way back machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20080914122442/http://wiki.bonsaitalk.com/index.php/Main_Page

 

[jeanluc83]

I just spent a couple of minutes going through the wiki. There is lots of good info there that would not be hard to create a new wiki with. The the problem I see is in the page info at the bottom:

Copyright ©2004-2005, bonsaiTALK.com, all rights reserved.

Legally reproducing the wiki could be the real problem. Then again I'm not sure how the internet archive is allowed to post a full copy.

 

[Bonsai Nut]

Legally reproducing the wiki could be the real problem. Then again I'm not sure how the internet archive is allowed to post a full copy.

You missed the most important part "This page was last modified 04:30, 16 December 2006". I have looked into various wiki solutions over the years. I even went so far as to create a Wiki outline that I never used. For vBulletin, the options to fully integrate wiki content into your site were extremely limited. Xenforo is a lot easier to work with so I might take another look.

One of the other reasons why I didn't pursue this option too aggressively is that some of this content has been moved over / made available on Wikipedia. I believe some of the folks at the Phoenix Bonsai Society were behind a really good section on bonsai history, for example. I just checked out Wikipedia, however, and there are some pretty big gaping holes in the content. You go from a great section on history, for example, to a two sentence paragraph on bonsai propagation So it isn't perfect

 

[JudyB]

And some of this information is outdated as well, but still an interesting resource.

 

[jeanluc83]

You go from a great section on history, for example, to a two sentence paragraph on bonsai propagation So it isn't perfect

Maybe the answer is rallying the talent and expertise we have here to improve the Wikipedia articles.

 

[jeremy_norbury]

Was a long time member of BT.

 

[Dav4]

Was a long time member of BT.

Same here...had a few thousand posts and a bunch of threads over there. All the "before" pics of the trees I've had the longest are there...never expected the forum to go belly up so never saved them.

 

[Bonsai Nut]

Same here...had a few thousand posts and a bunch of threads over there. All the "before" pics of the trees I've had the longest are there...never expected the forum to go belly up so never saved them.

That is the loudest complaint / disappointment that I heard when BT went down. A lot of people had invested a lot of time in their progression threads, etc, and that content was all lost.

BT used the same vBulletin software backbone that BonsaiNut used when it first started. It was old code that had never been rewritten from scratch and had numerous technical artifacts / skeletons in the closet. Hackers inevitably found these holes and created exploits. BonsaiNut (when it was running vBulletin) was hacked twice - once lightly and once more dramatically. The second hack was the one that I'm pretty sure brought down BT. It was a hack in the installation code that allowed someone to go in via a backdoor and though they couldn't access the site code, they could create a phantom admin account. With the admin account they could import malicious code, which in turn, would compromise the site. In the case of BonsaiNut, I closed the backdoor within 24 hours and was able to find the malicious files, as well as the daughter files that they had created (there were over 1000 compromised files). I still have the main malicious files because I wanted to look at them and see what they did.

I can't remember now if the database was compromised or not. I think towards the end, it might have been, but I was able to go in and scrub the database manually and delete everything I didn't recognize that had happened in the last few hours. Once your database is hacked, you have real issues, because if you don't have an archive or a backup, every time you go to reboot the site from clean code, you are reinfecting it from a compromised database. It can be a real (ie almost unrecoverable) problem. Plus vBulletin was really hard to work with and required a lot of customizations and mods to get it to do what you wanted. It was sometimes difficult to remember exactly how you installed and formatted things - even with a decent change log - so that if you had to rebuild the site from scratch it was a significant undertaking. I don't have a lot of fond memories of that code

After that main site hack I never really trusted the vBulletin code base again, and as soon as XenForo was live and getting good reviews, I moved the site over to the new code. I also changed my policies around database maintenance. In addition to standard server backups, I have archives on the remote server as well as archives on my home network. I want BonsaiNut to be around for a long time - hopefully outlasting even me

 

[coh]

I scanned through some of the posts and articles on that site and all I can say is...the more things change, the more they remain the same. Despite the millions of words that have been written on bnut and other forums in the past 10 or 15 years, other than some of the names of people posting - nothing has really changed. Same old arguments about naturalistic versus classical bonsai, when does a bonsai become "mine", are shows/awards fair, is bonsai art, yada yada yada...very interesting.

 

[Bonsai Nut]

I scanned through some of the posts and articles on that site and all I can say is...the more things change, the more they remain the same. Despite the millions of words that have been written on bnut and other forums in the past 10 or 15 years, other than some of the names of people posting - nothing has really changed. Same old arguments about naturalistic versus classical bonsai, when does a bonsai become "mine", are shows/awards fair, is bonsai art, yada yada yada...very interesting.

It sounds funny, but the primary reason I created BonsaiNut was to focus on "making" bonsai versus philosophizing about it. I was trying to recreate the feeling of a good bonsai workshop - where people style trees, share them, discuss, etc. Bonsai has never been about competition (to me). So I was hoping to leave all the philosophy on BT and just focus on trees But at the end of the day, it is all one big community, and if people want to talk about a bonsai subject, or argue about soil, or discuss classical styling, it's all good as long as people TRY to be respectful

The most controversial thing I ever did on this site was when I tried to start a discussion on design and the application of the Golden Mean

 

[coh]

It sounds funny, but the primary reason I created BonsaiNut was to focus on "making" bonsai versus philosophizing about it. I was trying to recreate the feeling of a good bonsai workshop - where people style trees, share them, discuss, etc. Bonsai has never been about competition (to me). So I was hoping to leave all the philosophy on BT and just focus on trees But at the end of the day, it is all one big community, and if people want to talk about a bonsai subject, or argue about soil, or discuss classical styling, it's all good as long as people TRY to be respectful

Sure. I was just rather amused to find almost the same exact discussions 10-15 years ago, before I was involved with bonsai. You'd think we would have come to a consensus by now on some of these issues! It kind of tells me, it's not really worth getting involved in those debates as they never go anywhere. What did Jim Lewis used to say a lot, "have we beaten this horse enough?"

The most controversial thing I ever did on this site was when I tried to start a discussion on design and the application of the Golden Mean

I just briefly browsed back through one of those threads, it might be worth revisiting at some point. Maybe this winter, when most of us have relatively few bonsai-related tasks. If you're up to it, that is!