I've been looking for content on the Arduino Forum, and saw that old forum is now archived " forum-2005-2010-read-only ", thus we no longer can see who posted what message
.. first inconvenience
the contributors are unreachable, renamed " Forum System ", too bad
Here is a thread I would have loved to explore a bit more
Seems like YaBB links (Yet another Bulletin Board) contained vulnerabilities
Thus, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine could not redirect properly for safety's sake.
Does anyone know how I could find this post please ?
It's not that the posts are "archived" that causes the original poster to be lost, it's that those people have left the forums. For example, you can find some of my old posts, and they still show up as having been written by me. Improving SIG_OVERFLOW (timer0, millis, etc)
(There are laws requiring that you be able to "forget" people nowdays. Removing "names" from old posts seems like a partial effort in that direction.)
Internal links to other forum posts are a separate matter.
The assignment of posts made by people whose accounts were later deleted (which could have been done either on their own initiative or due to misbehavior) to the @system user is a legacy of the previous frameworks used for Arduino forum (SMF, and before that YaBB). When the forum was migrated to the Discourse forum framework in spring 2021, all those userless posts were assigned to @system.
Posts created since that time are always associated with a specific account. Although unfortunately we can't do anything about the historical posts, going forward this should avoid the specific type of bit rot where it could be difficult to follow a thread if the posts of multiple participants had later been assigned to @system.
As @westfw mentioned, users can submit a request for their account to be "anonymized" after they have left the forum, but the posts they created will still be associated with a dedicated inactivated forum account. These accounts have a name with the form "anon<random number>".
