So Long, MSDN Blog
ericlippert.com
ericlippert.com
Might be the copyright reform, but comments should still be fine with that.
FWIW, I completely agree with you on the chilling effect of upload filters. But upload filters aren't part of GDPR by any stretch of the imagination.
It also might not.
It might be worth it to some company to determine which it is, but who would expect that company to be Microsoft?
MSDN comments still exist and Microsoft operates several forums. Perhaps GDPR is a questionable excuse for some lazy sysadmin not wanting to migrate comments, but it doesn't fly here.
The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.
It was astonishing because of what the lawyers said: yes, it is a public relations risk to have ordinary employees communicating directly with the developer community, and we are willing to take on that risk if it dramatically improves our satisfaction metrics in the developer community.
We were basically told "don't be stupid, don't share corporate secrets, comport yourselves professionally, keep it on-topic, and if there are legal problems, legal will handle them appropriately".
I don't know that things would be the same today; it was a different time. But I'd hope so.
Basically the old accounts couldn't be carried over and so users wouldn't be able to log in anymore to delete their comments.
GDPR made it more expensive to port the comments, because it insisted that the user have control over their content. It did not prevent it from being done.
Unfortunately "right to be forgotten" has been wrongly defined in GDPR, if someone published something in a publicly available place, this shouldn't be removable on demand. I am perfectly for forcing companies to be obliged to delete its customers data if customer does not want make business with a said company or does not want to allow company to use the data for its business (like advertising), but this should not cover every random forum in the Internet.
In fact this is the reason those independent forum will disappear soon or later and be moved to Facebook, which is rather sad and shows only how EU bureaucracy is inefficient - they wanted to restrict Facebook usage of private data, instead they only caused even more people to move to Facebook and give up their privacy.
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/de...
In the end, they project is probably like any other, short on time, and not enough people to cover all the cases needed. As it is, it seems like it wasn't smooth, and comments would be a much larger complication. That doesn't mean it could never happen, just that it hasn't happened.
GDPR is the reason for deciding it's easier to dump them than to migrate them AND provide the controls they would likely need in place. It may be a small number of requests, relatively speaking, but judging from what YouTube, twitter and the like receive, I can't blame MS for taking the easy route.
Oh, and we can't forget xpclient wanting his old Explorer search style back.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190301040236/https://blogs.msdn...
1 - If you don't host your own content then you have no control over it. Microsoft deleted all their blogs. YouTube and Facebook will one day cease to exist. This comment and all of yours will disappear once news.ycombinator.com is defunct. If you want something to last, host it yourself or be prepared to recreate it somewhere else every few years.
2 - Once you publish something at a URL you control (see point 1), you have a responsibility to keep it available at the same URL. Nobody is going to hold you to it but you will break 3rd party sites that link to you. Microsoft really dropped the ball here.
Within the same distance into the future, most of today's knowledge will be gone.
The only way to increase the information's chance to survive any significant length of time is copies. But making copies of digital artefacts is so trivial we made it totally routine, when did your backups last run? Whereas historically objects like tablets were only reproduced if there was extraordinary interest, so we have mostly Bibles, and random lists that survived entirely by chance due to just how many there were, often inventories or other boring records.
With the existence of things like the Internet Archive, it’s quite possible the public web content of today will be well preserved for centuries to come.
And we also need to keep running the applications that know how to deal with specific file formats.
FWIW, with today's typical Internet speeds and storage prices, it's entirely feasible for individuals to mirror the entirety of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg (done both myself, and a bunch of other stuff like TED talks). Throw in a mirror of the entire Debian source package repository, and there's your apps, too. How many copies are already around? Who knows, but I'd say we already have a lot more redundancy than at any point in the past.
Of course, IA is to any of these like these are to what you could store locally circa 90s. I don't think we're going to be at the point where an individual can easily store 40 petabytes of data anytime soon. But for large entities - governments and corporations - this is feasible. And I suspect there are some private full IA mirrors out there already, in places like NSA's Utah data center.
And then you can make distributed backups, too: http://iabak.archiveteam.org/
Yeah I guess we need to trust that some of us will keep our recipe lists alive. :)
A bunch of it is already gone.
Think of all the music recordings that didn't make the transition from 78's → LP's → CD's → streaming.
Think of all the movies that didn't make the transition from film → videotape → DVD → streaming.
I'm always sad when I see the pile of books being discarded by the Chicago Public Library for 10¢ a piece, knowing that those that aren't picked up by the public end up in the trash. The information in them may be outdated, but it's an important window into what people felt/thought/believed in a particular period of time.
The world loses a metric assload of its history each day.
Make no mistake, certain content is worth archiving, but imagine if we'd been archiving everything since our species first days.
Now we have the capability, we're obsessed that we must archive everything; how useful are the older IMDB comments really?
I dread to think how much storage is 'wasted' in these archives storing useless content, and how useful it really is to people in reality.
There are archives of every reddit comment ever made, but there are many hundreds of thousands of spam or useless comments....
I don't think the Internet needs an immutable record of every piece of content or every hyper link to preserved for the rest of time, we need to discern what's really important and throw away the rest, if not to make it easier to parse (but, since that's difficult, we just grab it all which whilst great presents its own issues in terms of required resources).
Then there would be no "Mysteries of...!" shows on basic cable.
Goodbye design documents. Goodbye test plans. Goodbye user studies. Goodbye meeting notes. Goodbye just about everything interesting except for the source code of the project. And backups? "What is this word you are using . . . ''backup''?"
Which is why I just checked everything into source control and told the PMs they could bloody well learn how to use Source Depot.
But at the time I left Microsoft, I was told that .NET management no longer considered my blog a valuable asset, and that I should stop working on it on company time, and that they had “community PMs” who would be owning the relationship with the programming community.
Around that time I was also told, funnily enough, that I should never mention Windows on my blog, because the Windows marketing team wanted to own all communications with developers about writing software for Windows.
I really enjoyed my time at Microsoft; the people I left behind were amazing, and I miss working with them. And none of the above is high on the list of reasons why I left Microsoft. But middle management was weird, man, weird.
Doing a google search on the above comment leads to this HN comment...
BTW. Today is a great day to donate to the Web Archive:
"UPDATE: The (awesome) Scott Hanselman informs me that there has been a “hiccup” during migration, and that the intention was to archive the MSDN blogs in a read-only format with the same links; they should be back soon."
(E.L., in the comment section apropos wishes for a book)
I still edit my friend's programming books, but I sure don't do it for the money.
As for why, other community sites like TechCommunity are driving blogging at Microsoft for individuals, while product teams are looking to group official blogs (Windows, Office, and Visual Studio), and for blog posts that were really tutorials, moving them to open source documentation on https://docs.microsoft.com on GitHub. Customers ran into a number of issues where blogs provided out-of-date content/guidance that lead to support issues. For example, of the 16k+ blogs, 86% had not been used in 18 months and thousands were created with no posts or only a single blog post. Cheers,-Dan
Some still have thin content, but I've been pleasantly surprised to keep finding the new docs as the top search results. Just a year or two ago, it was a crap shoot.
As an example, here is the top result for "C# Synchronization Primitives" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/threading/o...
http://web.archive.org/web/20190301145321/https://blogs.msdn...
Hosting costs may be peanuts for them, but there’s also maintenance. Even if they don’t bother updating the look of the site, there’s the fact that old sites eventually run on no longer supported technologies that may only run on unsupported OSes, both potentially riddled with security vulnerabilities.
That said, lots of times Microsoft's left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
That would just be nuts. There is a ton of legacy code that needs maintenance and therefore needs documentation. this is not the JS world where it's OK to break stuff twice a year.
Win32 is mostly stuck in how Windows XP used to be.
This way I know that the link will not rot and I will have a record of the exact information that lead to the decision I am documenting.
Edit: I wonder how the wayback machine deals with GDPR compliance Edit 2: After further research, there is an exemption for archiving for the public interest. It looks like this was either an overreaction of MS's legal staff or simply blaming migration issues on GDPR.