Effort to compile and organize Chiff Board info?

Hi all, with the Chiff board seemingly in imminent danger of collapse, I’ve been thinking of how the wealth of knowledge might be preserved and organized into something like a Whistle Wiki or a downloadable PDF, maybe even a published tome. I’m not sure what the level of interest is, especially among the senior board members, but I’d hate to see it all vanish one day without something tangible to represent the roughly quarter century’s worth of activity it contains.

It would take some effort to search, organize, and (most importantly) curate the data, since there’s probably a lot of nonsense mixed in with the expertise. AI might be able to assist in crawling the whole board and sorting things by topic, but my AI knowledge is limited, and initial attempts were blocked by web policies. I know it can be done, but I’m not sure how to do it.

The other option is a group effort, where multiple people take sections and build them out, perhaps on a shared document. Some members could also add supplementary details to fill in gaps or refine the raw board data. For instance, I know there’s a lot of collective knowledge about various makers that seems to pop up in conversations, but I’m not sure if it’s all recorded anywhere.

Topic suggestions

History of the board itself (Maybe Dale could pitch in an introduction)

Whistle History (Clarke, Generation, the use of lead in fipple blocks, etc.)

Whistle Design

• Bore shapes (cylindrical, conical, wide vs narrow, thick wall vs thin, etc)
• Hole sizing and placement (WHY SIX HOLES??)
• Bernoulli’s effect on ramp design
• Whistle material and its effect on tone
• Tuning and Balancing principles (What makes a good whistle)

Biographical info and process details on various makers (Bernard Overton, Colin Goldie, Michael Copeland, Michael Burke, Hans Bracker, Cilian Ó Briain, Maurice Reviol, Pat O’Riordan, Carbony (Rob Gandara), Phil Hardy, Bleazey, Swayne, Tony Dixon, Grinter, Abell, Ronaldo Reyburn, Alba, J.P. LeMeur, Lofgren, Dante, Dave Shaw, Sweet, Goldfinch, etc.)

• This might include experiences of whistle transactions and records of customer service as reported and discussed by Chiff members throughout the years
• I also recall Hans Bracker making a series of design posts as he developed his whistles (shame he no longer makes them)

Select Board member profiles - I think it’d be nice to understand the backgrounds of some of the people who made the forum so lively and useful over the years, but I also see that we’d need to be careful with personal info if the poster hasn’t chosen to go public. For instance, the late Feadoggie offered invaluable advice, and while a handful of people may have known his true identity, we’d need to leave it out unless there was some way of getting authorization from his family.

Chiff stories and anecdotes - this could just be a spot to preserve some of the more entertaining interactions or stories, if anyone has a favorite.

Nuts and bolts stuff:
Advice on selecting a whistle
Whistle Maintenance
Whistle Recording tips and tricks

There are practical considerations. For one, copyright for every post belongs to the respective authors. Do you think you can obtain permissions for all of them for republication?

I see this as what it is, a discussion forum. A collection of conversations that should not endure beyond the duration of the conversation.

The following is NOT legal advice, and anyone seeking to do this should consult a lawyer (and not me, because I haven’t taken the bar exam yet ). This is just my personal opinion based on my admittedly vague understanding of copyright law:

I would think that downloading the contents of a forum and uploading them on a wiki would qualify as fair use easily, because it’s done for educational purposes, it isn’t done for profit, and it doesn’t negatively affect anyone commercially. Reposting social media posts can sometimes qualify as fair use even if it’s done for profit (that’s why news websites are able to display social media posts they didn’t write), so something like this that is done not for profit should qualify as fair use, I would think.

Moreover, the user agreement states “You agree that ‘Chiff and Fipple Forums’ have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic at any time should we see fit.” This is essentially just moving content, so you arguably agreed C&F could do this when you signed up.

So it seems to me like this wouldn’t be a legal problem whatsoever. But again, someone with actual experience in copyright law (particularly outside the US, since many of our members are from Europe) should be consulted about this.

Overall, this sounds like a very good idea to me. I wasn’t aware this forum was dying, but if it is, it should be preserved.

I’ve seen an archived forum where everything was preserved as it was but could no longer be modified, thereby slashing the hosting costs as it no longer needed interaction beyond loading requested pages by following links. In that form it may even be possible to have it hosted for free, so it would never disappear. I don’t know if that can be done with the forum software currently used here, but perhaps there’s an export function to shift all the content to another forum software package that allows such archiving.

Artificial intelligence will in a few years be able to automate most of the work of selecting content to put into a wiki and do as good a job as a team of people, while human experts would be able to monitor the process to make sure all the good stuff is transferred. That could be done even if the site is offline after folding and only stored on a hard drive, so it would take serious mistakes for it all to disappear.

Aside from the ‘Chiff Stories and Anecdotes’ suggestion (which is optional for the purposes of the project), most of the information would be gathered and rewritten into a coherent section on whatever topic, so it wouldn’t be a straight copy of discussions. As far as I understand, that would be fair use. I’d view it more like a historian searching primary sources for material for a book on a specific topic. There might be a direct quote here and there, with cited sources, but overall, it’s a new work. Ultimately, that is asking a lot more than just a simple copy paste job, but as someone who has spent hours looking through multiple old Chiff posts in search of specific information on a given topic, I’d love to have a more efficient way to access the same data.

Horrors !

What are the indications of “imminent danger of collapse” ?

trill

What are the indications of “imminent danger of collapse”

The board sodtware threw a periodic wobble last week. It was fixed. It will probably one day collapse beyond repair if the database grows too big.

I floated the idea once posts should be deleted after five years to keep thiings flowing. I still think that would be a good idea.

“You agree that ‘Chiff and Fipple Forums’ have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic at any time should we see fit.” This is essentially just moving content, so you arguably agreed C&F could do this when you signed up.

No it isn’t and we didn’t. That’s a clause that enables the mods to do their job. It isn’t a blanket permission to republish content.

I can relate to both sides of this discussion, i.e., the desire to avoid losing the collective knowledge, and the desire for people to retain rights to their posts, but some AI engine has probably already been trained using the contents of this database and will no doubt be happy to answer whatever questions you pose in the future, in such a way that it sounds like one of us wrote it.

I’m not arguing that this is either good or bad, or that the answers will be correct or factual, just that it is likely that they will resemble content mined from this forum. Its the world we already live in.

Mind explaining how what AngelicBeaver is proposing entails more than simply moving content? Republishing in the event of the original’s deletion is “moving,” it seems to me. Before, the content was in one place. Now, it’s in another, and it’s not in the original place. That’s moving. So if you agree to have your content “moved,” you’re agreeing to exactly that.

I suppose the counterargument would be that “move” only entails moving things around on the forum, not outside it to a different website. But it doesn’t explicitly say that, so at the very least it’s ambiguous and not clear one way or the other.

I suggest anyone concerned about copies being taken of their posts in the context of the discussion has a look at The Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/ and then decide if they want to post.

If a guest can read a post the crawlers can. Admin may even help some of them do a better job - as I write this post there are 2 registered users active: Bing [Bot], david_h

A search for “is it possible to take a static copy of a phpBB bullet board” suggests that the answer is yes. But that trying to do it without the co-operation of the administrators would be highly antisocial.

I’m on a forum where if there’s no activity on a thread for 30 days it’s locked.

To me it’s a step in the wrong direction- it’s bringing chat forums closer to the Facebook thing where you’ll see a thread that’s interesting but you’re in a rush, and the next day you can’t find it because it’s been swept away in the inexorable stream.

What you get is people having to start a new disconnected thread every time new information comes to light concerning the same topic.

I’m on other forums where months, years, or decades after a thread’s initial body of chat somebody revives it with important new information on the topic, data that didn’t exist when the thread was started. This way all the pertinent data is in one place and easy to find.

Yeah, I agree. One of the most annoying things about how modern social media has replaced forums is the way you lose access to older content. I absolutely love that I can dig up multiple-decade-old conversations on here, and if we lost that feature, there doesn’t seem to be much point to a forum in the first place.

, there doesn’t seem to be much point to a forum in the first place.

It’s a discussion board/forum. Nomen est omen.

Dale’s old chiffandfipple.com ‘main page’ refers to it as a ‘message board’ and says (amongst other things) that it is “where you will find people anxious to answer your questions”. The hosting software name includes ‘BB’ for Bulletin Board and for several decades the Internet has had many of these most of which have a search function to help people find answers to questions that have already been asked. Many say sternly that people must search before asking a question again. The chiffboard is supportive of search engines (as I type this both Bing and Google are logged in as users).

The music forums here don’t seem to be only about ephemeral chat. There are other places on the web that are set up for that (and make it difficult to find old discussions). It would appear they are more popular these days.

Shouldn’t this discussion be in the Pub?