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aerobat
06-06-2007, 01:21 AM
We are finally back up after a hiatus of twelve days. During most of that time (eleven days), the site was locked up and unavailable to all the Taking Flight membership except for the small group of former moderators who created their alternative site. Neither Mark nor any of us who were keeping TF afloat on the lifeboat site had access.

We know that many of you, as you return to our main site, will have questions about what happened. There was a communications blackout because those who stood by Taking Flight had no access to the members' mail list. We were only able to get the word out today. As questions arise, we will find ways to process what happened as constructively and quickly as possible. Healing and moving forward are very important to us all.

But some things are still a mystery to us, and one of them is the sad fact of missing posts. As soon as we had access to the site we saw the evidence everywhere.

The vanished former moderators have deleted every one of their posts in all forums here. At least one entire forum is gone as well, and the Moderators' Forum, which perhaps most of you didn't know existed because it was invisible, has been wiped clean.

More perplexing and dismaying is the fact that many members' posts are missing as well. Any post that was embedded in a thread begun by one of the former mods has been lost. A number of my posts are gone. All of us who actively posted have been affected.

For those of you who happened to have copied and saved posts--yours or others'--that were important to you, and you find them missing, we will create a space for them. This is one of the many tasks we face in this phase of reconstruction.

On the happy side, most of our posts are still here. The actions we took to hold fast to Taking Flight were strongly motivated by the need to preserve the archives, which would otherwise have been lost. These thousands of posts belong to the whole community, and are not something to ever be tossed to the wind in a storm.

Barb

Barb-SAN
06-06-2007, 01:53 AM
I was saddened to see that all the threads with discussions we'd had with Capt. Ray about aviation weather are gone. We had a great thread last summer, where he had taken some beautiful pictures of summer cummulonimbus storm clouds from the cockpit while flying into Los Angeles. I'd happened to take photos of similar clouds from the ground in San Diego, and had captured a screen shot of the radar of the same cloud. That made an interesting discussion, comparing what we had seen from each perspective, and he wrote about how they flew to avoid those clouds. I so regret that I didn't make a backup copy of that thread, as it was a great one to use for reference. Fear of flying in thunderstorms is such a common concern here.

However, I probably do have my own photographs of those clouds still on my hard drive, and as we work toward reconstruction, perhaps I will repost them on Capt. Hutch's forum. Aerobat Barb says he has some photos too, so maybe he will have some that show the view of thunderstorms from the cockpit. It is reassuring to us to see what the pilots see!

kari
06-06-2007, 10:33 AM
Be careful. If they are Ray's photos then you can't repost them without his permission.

Barb-SAN
06-06-2007, 12:59 PM
Be careful. If they are Ray's photos then you can't repost them without his permission.

Thanks for the reminder Kari. I guess I wasn't clear...the photos I'm referring to on MY hard drive are the ones that I took of clouds seen from the ground, and corresponding radar shots. We would need to see if Capt. Hutch has anything in his photo collection that would show similar clouds from the pilot's perspective.

You do raise an important point though. Mark may have more to say about this. It's possible that even if we can find backup copies of deleted threads, we won't be able to restore them without permission from the authors of those threads (even if they include some of OUR posts...and we didn't want OUR writing deleted!) :cry:

Passenger Mark
06-06-2007, 01:38 PM
Anything that was posted on Taking Flight... then or now... is the property of Taking Flight. It is in the agreement.


I don't want to get into a long discussion about what happened to the posts... Barb did a very good job of explaining what we saw when the forums were returned.

Her question, and the reason for this thread, is if someone has a copy of any of their posts, that they wish to have included, please forward the same to us.

Barb-SAN
06-06-2007, 02:09 PM
Her question, and the reason for this thread, is if someone has a copy of any of their posts, that they wish to have included, please forward the same to us.

Technical detail: Will you be setting up a special mailbox for those member-submitted posts?

Passenger Mark
06-06-2007, 02:19 PM
Technical detail: Will you be setting up a special mailbox for those member-submitted posts?

Yep... They can forward them to our staff PM TF Team (http://www.takingflight.us/forums/member.php?u=1634).