Wade Rice (hutton_switch) from Alexandria, VA back here again. I was moderator under this forum in its old format, and have yet to get over the loss of all that valuable information posted. I feel particularly for one individual who posted here regularly, Brian DeVries (BR&P Pickup), who had posted a lot of information on the old BR&P that was taken over by the B&O in 1932, and I'm sure he's really mourning that loss as well, and to the best of my knowledge, he will likely not be returning, but I could be wrong.
To prevent the loss of such valuable information in the future, I feel it is too much to ask of moderator(s) of any forum to regularly back up all of the information individuals post, unless they want to take on that responsibility. I'm not sure what the RR.net owners are doing to archive information, other than maybe a regular system backup based on technical failure. That doesn't address the loss of information, or more importantly, conversion of it to be accessible for future inquiries or research, whenever a new system upgrade is launched, as has just happened. Also, I see no provision of a method for posting archival information to a "Files" or "Photos" section like the forums in Yahoo! allow. And last, but not least, we have no guarantee that something like what has just happened will not occur again in the future.
In light of all this, the best "do-able" thing I believe that could be done is for interested individuals to back up whateve they can of this valuable historical information on their own to ASCII text files (*.txt) for long-term archival retrieval. The problem would then be how to make the information available again from those private individuals to the rest of the forum members.
If you have gotten this far, thanks for reading it and listening to me rant and rave a bit on what I feel is a big loss.
Wade Rice
Member, B&O RR Historical Society
http://www.borhs.org
Daniel Willard (1860-1942) and Jervis Langdon, Jr. (1905-2004) - Two of B&O's best presidents and managers!
President Leonor Loree (1858-1940) brought the B&O into the 20th century!