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Tiki Central - What Happened???

Okolehao

Okolehao

Well-known member
Forgive me if the answer, the real answer, is somewhere out there on the interweb, but what the hell happened to Tiki Central? It was the heart of the Tiki revival. An old web page at the URL complained about server problems, but nothing has been posted since. An encyclopedia of hundreds of thousands of posts, photos, and events just vanished overnight. How did this happen?
 
I finally signed up here to be able to get my Tiki fix. I miss Tiki Central so much. The entire collecting archive as well as everyone's home bar builds, mug making etc. It is such a loss. I pray it comes back or that the wayback machine saved at least some of it. crying into my Mai Tai :cry: If Holden can't manage to revive it I hope he passes it onto someone who can.
 
From my understanding, TC was running older forum software. When the server OS was upgraded, the forum software was unable to operate. The owner of TC says all the data is secure and in his possession, and was/is planning to bring it back online. That was a long, long time ago. That's about all I know. A handful of us started hanging out here, and it's been great! Hope to see you both in some of the other threads.

Welcome to the Tiki Forum!
 
It was a great resource! I knew something was not right when I tried to signup about a year before they went offline. The registration process was messed up. You had to email one of the moderators and they had to contact the owner I think. I believe they were manually adding new members the last year. I did try to get one of their anniversary pins, but was too late. I was bummed.

tiki-central.jpg

RIP I guess.
 
NekolikesFugu said:
I finally signed up here to be able to get my Tiki fix. I miss Tiki Central so much. The entire collecting archive as well as everyone's home bar builds, mug making etc. It is such a loss. I pray it comes back or that the wayback machine saved at least some of it. crying into my Mai Tai :cry: If Holden can't manage to revive it I hope he passes it onto someone who can.
Click to expand...

I really enjoyed the site, but the mods were a little heavy handed at times. Just saying.
 
I see some members of reddit ask about TC every few months. I don't think it's coming back folks.


Sorry Joey Tribbiani GIF
 
O.k. Here’s the deal. I found that you’re able to get a a lot of Tiki Central’s old postings by using the Wayback Machine website https://web.archive.org/
You have to do some fiddling around to get there, and you can’t fully navigate the old website, but from what I’ve seen most all posts and photos can be seen. Sometimes you have to wait awhile on a screen that looks like a dead end but suddenly it’ll pop. But it’s snapshots of the past and not the real deal. You can’t do searches and you can’t post. You can’t really get anything from recent years. I’ve been playing around with an update from 2017. But it’s all there to read folks.
If anyone knows how to build and maintain a website forum I’m up for investing in a project. Somewhere on the site it claimed 500,000 members. That’s a lot of eyes on banner ads to pay for maintaining a website. Check it out
web.archive.org

Forum Index - Tiki Central

Forum Index
web.archive.org
 
Okolehao said:
O.k. Here’s the deal. I found that you’re able to get a a lot of Tiki Central’s old postings by using the Wayback Machine website https://web.archive.org/
You have to do some fiddling around to get there, and you can’t fully navigate the old website, but from what I’ve seen most all posts and photos can be seen. Sometimes you have to wait awhile on a screen that looks like a dead end but suddenly it’ll pop. But it’s snapshots of the past and not the real deal. You can’t do searches and you can’t post. You can’t really get anything from recent years. I’ve been playing around with an update from 2017. But it’s all there to read folks.
If anyone knows how to build and maintain a website forum I’m up for investing in a project. Somewhere on the site it claimed 500,000 members. That’s a lot of eyes on banner ads to pay for maintaining a website. Check it out
web.archive.org

Forum Index - Tiki Central

Forum Index
web.archive.org
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean about "building and maintaining a website forum"? You do know, that's what THIS site is, right? Are you talking about getting the old database from Tiki Central and creating a new site? The owner of that data already stated he will not let anyone have it. If you are talking about "scraping" all the data from The Wayback Machine, that has been suggested but from my understanding it is too difficult or impossible.

As for the 500,000 members, that is grossly inflated due to the admin not removing the spammer accounts. I asked the admin of this forum about that and he says this forum routinely gets spammer accounts as well, but he deletes/blocks them to prevent the forums here from becoming spamfests. If he left those in, I imagine the member count here would be well over 10,000 strong. The Tiki community has scattered to a handful of platforms. Reddit, Facebook Groups, and 2 Tiki forums that I know of. Once they scattered to the winds, it's tough to bring them back together.

Mahalo for the post!
 
Kahikina said:
I'm not sure what you mean about "building and maintaining a website forum"? You do know, that's what THIS site is, right? Are you talking about getting the old database from Tiki Central and creating a new site? The owner of that data already stated he will not let anyone have it. If you are talking about "scraping" all the data from The Wayback Machine, that has been suggested but from my understanding it is too difficult or impossible.

As for the 500,000 members, that is grossly inflated due to the admin not removing the spammer accounts. I asked the admin of this forum about that and he says this forum routinely gets spammer accounts as well, but he deletes/blocks them to prevent the forums here from becoming spamfests. If he left those in, I imagine the member count here would be well over 10,000 strong. The Tiki community has scattered to a handful of platforms. Reddit, Facebook Groups, and 2 Tiki forums that I know of. Once they scattered to the winds, it's tough to bring them back together.

Mahalo for the post!
Click to expand...
I guess that promoting building a competing tiki website isn’t very “cricket”, as the Brits would say, which is something I wouldn’t want to do. Sorry. The hard lesson from the demise of Tiki Central was that having the heartbeat of the tiki community in only one man’s control was a bad situation. Just look what happened. TC had so much research history it’s mind boggling to think what has been lost. I imagine people like Swen Kirsten have felt like taking a knife to their wrist. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more said about the situation. It seems like the major contributors just shrugged and moved on.
If anyone suggested forming a Save Tiki Central group with volunteers willing to spend time scrapping the site, I’d join in and help bring the old threads to this forum - if the moderators would be amenable. It doesn’t matter where the information goes only that it’s not lost forever.
Mahalo
 
I think this is an excellent idea. I'm not sure how to do any of the saving, moving or whatever, but I'm happy to try. What do you propose, just putting the info in new threads, or creating a new section, or something else?
 
I like this idea as well. We would need some sort of template I would think. Something like:

create new thread
insert original post title for subject
insert original name of poster in top part of post
insert content
(maybe insert some type of disclaimer on the very bottom, like "This content originally posted on TC on <date>")

Things to consider... Would we just be capturing the original post, or the entire thread?

Thoughts?
 
Kahikina said:
I like this idea as well. We would need some sort of template I would think. Something like:

create new thread
insert original post title for subject
insert original name of poster in top part of post
insert content
(maybe insert some type of disclaimer on the very bottom, like "This content originally posted on TC on <date>")

Things to consider... Would we just be capturing the original post, or the entire thread?

Thoughts?
Click to expand...
If it used the same forum software and recreated the titles of each thread that then have hyperlinks to the Wayback thread as the first post. Then the rest of the thread becomes new posts to the subject.
 
Okolehao said:
If it used the same forum software and recreated the titles of each thread that then have hyperlinks to the Wayback thread as the first post. Then the rest of the thread becomes new posts to the subject.
Click to expand...

I suppose that could work, but now you're relying on that other website for your content. What if they go away, or for some reason, refuse other sites from direct linking to their content?

Also, I'm not sure why you would want to use the old forum software? If I remember correctly it was phpBB forum. (free) You had to manually keep up with security updates and upgrades. Which may be part of the reason it fell so far behind in it's version that was used. Pretty high maintenance IMO.
 
My brother, who is an IT guy, talked to a mentor who’s well seasoned in php programing and bulletin boards. They guy took a look at the Wayback Machine captures and was able to find and dig into some of the code. He said the program was a mess with security holes and all sorts of code problems stemming from a lack of periodic upgrades. He thought that the problems were so bad that the best thing the administrator could do was to start over. To go back and run each upgrade to the present software was more work, with no guarantees, than it was worth. I have a feeling that’s the reason we haven’t seen Tiki Central come back, and probably never will. The life lesson being keep your software up to date or else. Very sad.
 
Tangaroa said:
It was a great resource! I knew something was not right when I tried to signup about a year before they went offline. The registration process was messed up. You had to email one of the moderators and they had to contact the owner I think. I believe they were manually adding new members the last year. I did try to get one of their anniversary pins, but was too late. I was bummed.

View attachment 594

RIP I guess.
Click to expand...
I had the same exact problem with registration and sign-in issues. It got so frustrating, I eventually gave up.
 
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