MTFCA Forum

Hello everyone,
As some of you will be aware, I was missing in action for the past few years, and due to this, my website has suffered too.
It's been a difficult few years for me, going through a divorce, but fortunately it's all worked out good in the end.

One of the functions I noticed that had failed on my website was the Guestbook.
While I have been able to recover it for the most part, entries after 2016 have been sadly lost.

I'd be very grateful, if you've made use of my website in some way, no matter how small, if you'd be so kind as to leave a comment in the Guestbook

https://www.fordmodelt.net/guestbook/

Thank you in advance

ModelTMitch wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 30, 2023 12:51 am

Hello everyone,
As some of you will be aware, I was missing in action for the past few years, and due to this, my website has suffered too.
It's been a difficult few years for me, going through a divorce, but fortunately it's all worked out good in the end.

One of the functions I noticed that had failed on my website was the Guestbook.
While I have been able to recover it for the most part, entries after 2016 have been sadly lost.

I'd be very grateful, if you've made use of my website in some way, no matter how small, if you'd be so kind as to leave a comment in the Guestbook

https://www.fordmodelt.net/guestbook/

Thank you in advance

I went to the WAYBACK website that captures data from all websites. It doesn't look like your site was up and running after 2016
You can click on the black bars to see what was captured on the guestbook link on that day
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221065 ... /gbook.php

That's a very old screenshot of my website and I know for a fact it was working after 2016, but I wasn't aware that the Guest book had malfunctioned. It's possibly a server issue I wasn't aware of.

TRDxB2 wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 30, 2023 1:18 am

ModelTMitch wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 30, 2023 12:51 am

Hello everyone,
As some of you will be aware, I was missing in action for the past few years, and due to this, my website has suffered too.
It's been a difficult few years for me, going through a divorce, but fortunately it's all worked out good in the end.

One of the functions I noticed that had failed on my website was the Guestbook.
While I have been able to recover it for the most part, entries after 2016 have been sadly lost.

I'd be very grateful, if you've made use of my website in some way, no matter how small, if you'd be so kind as to leave a comment in the Guestbook

https://www.fordmodelt.net/guestbook/

Thank you in advance

I went to the WAYBACK website that captures data from all websites. It doesn't look like your site was up and running after 2016
You can click on the black bars to see what was captured on the guestbook link on that day
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221065 ... /gbook.php

Mitch,

I had a quick look at this going back. I have an idea there wouldn't have been any actual entries after about Nov '16, would that be possible?

Not sure how you were/are storing the data, but if you're certain there were guestbook entries, and they were in a standard database, I wonder if you've tried directly accessing said database and/or 'fixing' any corrupt tables?

Happy to assist off-forum if that's of any use, otherwise all the best with your quest for new entries

Luke.

Note: I see a couple of posts arrived while I was typing (had an interruption!) .. FWIW my take on it is that your site was working, but someone or something had messed up a redirect - hence my thought there may not have been any entries post Nov.

Hi Luke,
The guestbook entries are stored in a simple text file, while the guestbook itself is PHP based for security, there is no MySQL database behind it.
I think there may have been entries post 2016, but when I rebuilt the website a month or so ago, I forgot to download the entries file from the server first, big mistake!! So unless there's an old backup of the site I can access via Cpanel, then those entries will be lost.

Luke wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 30, 2023 1:35 am

Mitch,

I had a quick look at this going back. I have an idea there wouldn't have been any actual entries after about Nov '16, would that be possible?

Not sure how you were/are storing the data, but if you're certain there were guestbook entries, and they were in a standard database, I wonder if you've tried directly accessing said database and/or 'fixing' any corrupt tables?

Happy to assist off-forum if that's of any use, otherwise all the best with your quest for new entries

Luke.

Note: I see a couple of posts arrived while I was typing (had an interruption!) .. FWIW my take on it is that your site was working, but someone or something had messed up a redirect - hence my thought there may not have been any entries post Nov.

I don't know about Cpanel but you should be able to FTP to your site and do a directory listing in order to see if the file is still there (and what date it reports).

That said I'm still suspicious the problem didn't occur shortly after Nov 2016, given the crawler was getting a 301 error for the link post that date.

In re-reading your reply I guess that perhaps it's the same filename you used throughout, in which case if it was overwritten a month ago then it probably is lost. However my recollection of the error message I saw yesterday when I was looking at the site history suggested there may have been a different filename (or link) at one stage...

Probably all academic anyway, hopefully you'll get a few new entries to compensate!

Luke.