Out of curiosity, I changed the topic number in the URL to 10 and found one of the very first posts on the Arduino forum from feb 2010!
Here is the link: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/shameless-suggestion/10.
It was really fun to swap the number 10 with other random numbers to discover old threads!
My first post was in jun 2013 https://forum.arduino.cc/t/light-controlled-mixer-blender-project-for-arduino/169134
Ah yes, when you had both the costycnc user name and costy35.
Yes ... thank to @pert i unified old account costy35 with the costycnc account,now i have only costycnc account !
Now can see all that im here in this forum from 2013!
Bah. 2010 is late. I think My first post was back in 2007
I changed the topic number
(I'm not sure how the "topic numbers" are related to dates. They may have gotten re-arranged when the forum software was changed.)
(It is bit weird to think that some of the people I'm helping now, could have been not born yet when I first started participating here.)
yes
https://forum.arduino.cc/c/forum-2005-2010-read-only/recycle-bin/development/8
this did
so i put /c/ in https://forum.arduino.cc/c/
and at finish i try with 1,2,3,4 ... but seem that begin with 8 give some result
with /t/ is this forum and begin with 10
It's funny! Perhaps because I'm working so deep with HTML query links for my project, I just can't let it go unnoticed!
And no doubt many that you have helped over the years are no longer with us.
a7
I find post from 2005
https://forum.arduino.cc/c/forum-2005-2010-read-only/11/l/top?ascending=true&order=activity
And Yes!
It looks like that did indeed happen.
I did a database query and found this is the first topic ever:
Followed by the runners up in the forum's first ten topics:
Cool!
How true.
A good reason for continuing to archive all the posts as a small thank you for past help.
Despite it's ups and downs, this is still a community of like minded people.
Are you working on an archiving initiative?
No
Just getting older and reflecting.
Becoming acutely aware of how the past shapes the present.
Having had parents and grandparents who fought and suffered in world wars, didn't get the recognition they deserved, memories become more important as the years go by.
The Arduino forum is based on many years of contributions, experiences, nice to share and keep.
I have enough to do without starting something else.
That is entirely understandable. I got the impression from your post that maybe such an initiative was underway. That would certainly be interesting. This forum contains significant history of the open source hardware movement, as well as a tremendous store of knowledge related to embedded systems. I hope that the content will persist into perpetuity.
Some of the forum content is definitely archived by the Wayback Machine. However, it definitely doesn't have full coverage. Other than people manually submitting individual URLs, I'm not sure what determines which content gets archived (maybe backlinks?). I know there are one or two alternative internet archives, but haven't ever used them.
I'm always sad to see bit rot of interesting online content. For example, the very significant first post I linked in my previous post has rotted a bit due to Massimo Banzi's original forum account having been deleted. Since that occurred prior to the migration of the forum to the Discourse framework, ownership of the post was assigned to the forum's @system machine user. Sadly, it seems the post in its original form was not archived by the Wayback Machine. We can see the entry for the post here in the oldest archive of the Forum 2005-2010 (read only) > General > News category's topic listing:
There is also the Arctic Code Vault Contributor on GitHub that made a snapshot of all repo's somewhere in the past.
The irony is striking: information was once scarce and difficult to preserve, yet some of it survived for millennia. Today we create information in unimaginable quantities, but much of it may prove far more ephemeral.
Yes
The forum is a goldmine of information.
May it last for a very long time on a secure server somewhere.
Not least of all are the thousands of hours of effort that goes into it and the years of life experience as well.
There are two things I look at in the morning, the BBC News and the forum.
I dug deeper and found the oldest archive of the General > News category's topic listing, from before the time when all the pre-2011 topics were moved to the Forum 2005-2010 (read only) category:
FWIW, The Arduino Forum is my favorite forum, rating by things other than content (not that the content isn't also good.)
In reality does anyone starting to use Arduino these days look back at ancient forum posts however useful they might be ?
You can tell from many of the posts here from new users that they have not searched the forum before posting their question.
Nowadays they are more likely to use AI for help, either to solve a problem with code that they have written or to write the code in its entirety
At the same time, AI can provide many correct answers because it has been trained on a huge amount of technical knowledge, including the kind of information shared by communities such as the Arduino Forum.
