[answered]"Your Savebox is 232% full"

The limits work like this:

When a new message is added to a folder that is past the limit older messages are deleted to bring it back to 100%.

So if your inbox is full and you get a new PM it deletes the oldest one.

You musta had more in the savebox than is currently allowed (I think I lowered it at some point).

So if you save another you will lose some.

I will soon increase the limits of the savebox and then periodically delete everything in the PM database except in the saveboxes.

Well, that's useful to know, as I wasn't moving stuff to saved as there was lotsa room in the other PM folders. I guess I should move stuff over?

I just doubled the size of the savebox.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thankee!

Beth,

When I purge the PM database I'll give everyone advance notice.

For now it works like this:

50 PMs in inbox
25 in Sent
50 in saved
Outbox is not limited as they just stay there till they are read.

In the future I might lower the inbox and raise the savebox because then people could keep the messages they want while I could keep the size of the database down.

In any case it's no big deal for now. I am not going to be reducing anything until it becomes a technical issue.

A lot of the stuff that I save that seems important at the time, is not so relevant by the time it gets to be over 100% in the Savebox, and is deleted. So I just don't worry about it. Life works! :wink:

There are a few e-ddresses that are in PM's that I hadn't saved, so I'll move a couple over.

Thanks, craven.

oh, OK. So stuff gets automatically deleted? Good to know. I dont want stuff deleted if I havent myself decided to delete it ... So I guess I'd better start saving whatever PMs I want to keep to, I dunno, text files on my hard disk?

On an aside (and as a warning to other posters who are using other boards as well), I was on another board, posted loads on it and then kinda dropped out ... and found out a month or so ago that they automatically delete all your posts after three months. Never saw anything about that mentioned when I signed on! I was so bummed - that was one hell of a store of arguments, links and information on that specific topic that got binned ...

Same thing happened to Anastasia, and though she cares a lot less than me about such things, it was really a lot worse for her - it was on a board about a very personal topic, and her messages had been like a record of how she'd wrestled with some personal demons. Something like a personal diary mixed with a manual of lessons learned. Then one day, somebody asked about the number of pages of a topic, and the moderator mentioned in an aside that the board only had a max # of pages available, anyway, and every new post deleted an old post exceeding that #. She checked and most of what she'd written turned out to have gone. :-(

I think boards that do that should make a big fat bold warning about it when you first sign on! Anywho, all that on an aside, cause luckily thats not the case with A2K! ;-).

To be fair to those other boards normally they do that because they have a limit for what they can store by their host. Since we are on a dedicated server and I'm willing to cluster we have no real limit except what the forum can affort.

Right now we can afford a few thousand times the amount of posts here. Sites hosted on shared servers usually have a limit of about half of what we have posted here.

Just on principle, I never depend on saving anything on somebody's webserver.

Email messages (on hotmail or yahoo),
forums posts,
photos, graphics and content I want to share,
ICQ, AIM or MS Messenger logs,
even the bookmarks for my browser!

If it's not burned onto a CD, then it's not safely in my hands.

Oh, I dont mean that every board should keep everything eternally as a matter of principle - just that, if they do have an automatic-discard policy, they should very clearly warn about it when you sign in, and preferably not just in the fine print. People invest a lot of effort (and sometimes emotion) in their posts, y'know.

(I still have loads of Abuzz threads saved to my hard disk - started saving threads when Abuzz looked like it was going to go down any moment).

I'm with you on that nimh. Sometimes they don't realize that they'll need to prune but if they do they should let the members know before committing.

But now you have me all scared about data loss. Ima goan backup the server on my MP3 player again.

Me too, nimh. I've wondered about setting up some sort of central Abuzz thread database; like "sozobe has these threads saved:" and a list, but for lots of people. So if anyone is looking for a thread, they can then contact the person who (hopefully) saved it.

LOL! Sorry about that - didnt mean to scare you ... ;-)



Yeh, not a bad idea. I restored posts on some threads from my back-up several times, back when Abuzz was eating its own posts ever so often (and back when I cared ..) - and I remember thinking something along the lines of what you say back then.

I must admit I havent thought about any of that for a lo-ong time, though - havent even looked at an Abuzz thread, past or current, in many months.

Un huh. I have the bad habit of saving good emails in the email system, partly because if my own system crashes, yahoo still has it when I get back up. One fine day, I deleted all instead of just those marked. Slow learner, I guess.

Oy! That sucks. And you couldn't still retrieve them from the Trash box?

(Because of my Yahoo accounts being perennially almost-full, I empty Trash so often that it doesnt fulfill any think-again function, really - by the time I realise I deleted the wrong item, I've already emptied trash, as well ..).