Before having an online web based forum, Gupta users could access dedicated newsgroups to post questions and get information on Gupta related products.
These newsgroups were active between the year 1995 and 2010, accessible using newsreader clients (like Outlook, AgentForte etc).
In those years, the newsgroups gathered thousands of posts containing a lot of information.
Unfortunately, the newsgroups are long gone. After becoming read-only for a short period, Gupta moved to a web based forum and the old was shut down.
As newsreaders download posts locally, some of us still have a "copy" of the newsgroups and can be accessed locally to find still valuable info.
My personal goal: to convert the local posts and attachments to be compatible with this forum and import them so that the original posts are accessible again after many years of obscurity.
It seems that this goal has been achieved. Most posts are converted and can now be found in this forum.
There are limitations on the post structure though. Newsgroups are trees, so a thread can have multiple branches. This has to be fit into this forum which is flat.
So on some topics, the post sequence could be out of order. But at least they are combined into one topic.
Also, most posts on the newsgroups also hold the quote from the previous post it responds to. To limit the size of the import, I tried to cleanup the quotes.
Due to newsreader differences, there was no clear way for me to detect what is a quote or not. So the conversion tool I created for this task could not clean all posts.
So you might get in some cases strange text blocks when reading them in this forum.
During conversion I found newsgroup posts which contained binary data which were not usable or compatible with the forum posts here. I had to clean them, meaning the data is gone or the post is completely missing.
Another difference between this forum and newsgroups is cross-posting. A thread could be started in multiple newsgroups at the same time and could have replies independent of each other.
The custom created conversion tool tried to detect this and clean them. But there are still cross-posts present in this forum, meaning that a topic can be present in multiple sub-forums.
In the end, newsgroup threads could be imported here.
Topics and their posts have this info retained:
- The forum user is the original poster user name on the newsgroup
- The post time is the original one
- Posts start with the original poster name in the body text
- Any original attachments can be opened by clicking the link
As an example, the newsgroup post selected in the first screenshot above is present as topic & post like this:
The Newsgroups sub-forum is only accessible to registered users.
So guests to this forum need to register a free account first and login to access it.
You are unable to create new topics there, but you can reply on existing topics.
This is to keep new stuff in the forums they belong and enables you to respond or ask subsequent questions when the topic is suitable.
I hope you find the posts from the old newsgroups useful as it really contains tons of valuable info.
Here a direct link to the Newsgroups sub-forum:
viewforum.php?f=45
