In 2003, United-TI began to serve the graphing calculator programming community. Once far and away the foremost graphing calculator forum, over the years it has collected close to thirteen thousand members and 137,334 posts. Among the contents of its years of discussion threads are TI-BASIC and z80 programming tips and debate, ground-breaking projects, project announcements, and even the occasional bit of community politics. In recent years, sadly, United-TI's posting has gradually stagnated. Indeed, recent years have seen a shift almost entirely to occasional TI-Nspire posts. The loyal United-TI administrators have also moved on in life to jobs, college, and families.

Over the past year or two, I have been in contact with NETWizz, one of the UTI administrators, about the possibility of eventually merging United-TI's stagnant but valuable content into Cemetech. I am happy to announce that in the coming weeks, that merger will happen. Cemetech will build a new section holding the archives of many of United-TI's valuable subforums. We may also merge the UnitedIT file archives containing previously-unreleased projects into Cemetech's current Archives. I hope you'll join me in saluting nine admirable years of United-TI, and in welcoming the valuable content and visitors to whom we shall soon play host.
A sad day it is, indeed, whenever any organization decides to throw in the towel after so long a run.
This is awesome news! I once tried to make an account on UTi but looking through some posts realized everything was a couple years old. I also welcome all the information/posts from them, as before I joined Cemetech they were the basis in starting to teach me how to program. Good luck and good job.
chronomex wrote:
A sad day it is, indeed, whenever any organization decides to throw in the towel after so long a run.
Sad indeed. I'm happy to be able to facilitate all the great content not getting lost to the ages, though!

Zelda: Indeed, and when I was a beginner ASM programmer, I too learned many, many things from reading through United-TI topics.
I'm sad to see UTI will end, but I'm glad that at least, its content will be preserved, either as an archive or merging with another site. Personally I think merging might be better, though, because if UTI was abandonned, its software would stop getting updated then even if the site remained online, it would get hacked to the point where it would be unuseable, like what happened to Epic Programming Studios.

What will happen to duplicate accounts, though? Will they be merged together? Also I hope the UTI archives are really integrated into Cemetech's DB since it got pretty hard to search stuff after they shut down their download mod. Another cool thing would be to include UTI's own history as a sub-section of Cemetech's history, to tell from where their stuff came from, their history about how they were originally multiple sites that merged together, and so on.
Sad Indeed for us over at United-TI, but we recognize it is for the good of the community, and we made it roughly 10 years (if you count the year of planning). Basically we formed because as a large conglomerate and had the administrators of five sites all join forces and become peer-administrators to lead the way. Heck, back then we even wrote on our website software based in Perl/CGI and later PHP... and we Alpha Tested Invision Power Forums before it was released (oh, and when it was free).

I don't know what happened, but we lost all of our traffic and went from a top ranked hobbyist site to one that was all but forgotten about though everybody knows who we are.
We welcome UTI, also welcome to Cemetech NETWizz, ~intro NETWizz, :p nice meeting you.
Kerm - By the way, I'm an archivist-activist with extensive experience in hypertext preservation. Please, PLEASE let me help you do this merger right. I hate to see preservation/migration activities done badly, and it can be a minefield.
Kerm- This merge means a great expanse in the cemetech site. If you need any more moderators/forum moderators I would be willing to apply. If you have need of any help I would be willing to do almost anything.
chronomex wrote:
Kerm - By the way, I'm an archivist-activist with extensive experience in hypertext preservation. Please, PLEASE let me help you do this merger right. I hate to see preservation/migration activities done badly, and it can be a minefield.
While I still have my designs on the drawing board (and I've thought pretty extensively about how to fairly preserve United-TI's excellent forum contents), do you have anything in particular you'd like to suggest? I'd be more than willing to open up a dialog in this topic, and listen to ideas from all of you. Of course, in the interest of sanity, no guarantees.

Zelda: I appreciate your generous offer. I'll see how things change once the new content arrives and let you (and others) know.
KermMartian wrote:
chronomex wrote:
Kerm - By the way, I'm an archivist-activist with extensive experience in hypertext preservation. Please, PLEASE let me help you do this merger right. I hate to see preservation/migration activities done badly, and it can be a minefield.
While I still have my designs on the drawing board (and I've thought pretty extensively about how to fairly preserve United-TI's excellent forum contents), do you have anything in particular you'd like to suggest? I'd be more than willing to open up a dialog in this topic, and listen to ideas from all of you. Of course, in the interest of sanity, no guarantees.

Zelda: I appreciate your generous offer. I'll see how things change once the new content arrives and let you (and others) know.

Duncan is indeed an expert on this field. I'd vouch for his work.
NETWizz wrote:
Sad Indeed for us over at United-TI, but we recognize it is for the good of the community, and we made it roughly 10 years (if you count the year of planning). Basically we formed because as a large conglomerate and had the administrators of five sites all join forces and become peer-administrators to lead the way. Heck, back then we even wrote on our website software based in Perl/CGI and later PHP... and we Alpha Tested Invision Power Forums before it was released (oh, and when it was free).

I don't know what happened, but we lost all of our traffic and went from a top ranked hobbyist site to one that was all but forgotten about though everybody knows who we are.
I think the meta tags and that stuff might have been thrashed after the last site upgrade. I recall some forum softwares storing meta data as part of individual forum skins. Not sure what else could have caused the traffic drop, though, since many sites still links to UTI. Posting-wise, activity seems to move around from a site to another over the years, with a few lulls in-between.
Neat. I propose we merge their IP.Board into Cemetechs' phpBB. It'll keep the posts, likely keep user accounts if their transferred too.

If it's something different, let me know the general idea and I'll start the C6M templates Smile
*21 calculator salute*
elfprince13 wrote:
*21 calculator salute*
Well-said, sir.

@Nikky, Chronomex, and ComicIDIOT: I looked through the IBF data that they have, and even the posts table alone has a lot of information (including the usernames next to their userIDs, confusingly; I guess to handle guests). I will at least be using the categories, posts, members, and topics tables to generate a section under Projects or Links; the Links section might need a retitling, and is a good candidate because it's a mere single page at the moment. The UTI index would start with a blurb about UTI's history and some information on the site. The remainder of the page would be similar to the UTI forum index, in that you could click through to topic listings and then to topics. Since it need only be read-only, I'll re-use some of the Cemetech forum templates to display the category/topics/posts pages.
Could certain topics such as the Nspire hacking thread be opened for posting, though? Maybe not the older topics but some interesting ones that were recently discussed in.

Another idea could be to change every forum post/topic/member IDs so they're chronological, allowing everything to be merged into the current Cemetech categories, although then UTI's history might not look as present on the site and you would have to map every current Cemetech post/topic/member IDs to redirect to them, which I'm unsure how hard it would be. In Omnimaga's case, this was not much of an issue because all posts from previous databases were made at complete different times, so the database was simply tweaked to allow negative topic/post IDs.
It would be nice if we had a way to link our UTI and Cemetech accounts. I think a manual link by the administrative team would be a bad idea because of security issues/fuzzy identification; but I wouldn't mind writing a script allowing you to "login" to a UTI account from an already logged in Cemetech account to do things like merge post counts and have older posts show up using the search link on your profile page.
I am curious about what exactly will happen... will it be UTI with a Cemetech extension? Will all the posts be preserved and will all the accounts be merged as well? If so, that could be odd since I go by Thunderbolt there and Xeda here. Also, since I am considered staff there (as a super moderator), but I hardly hold a record for activity here, what changes will come of that?

On another note, will this help cut down the spambot activity? I know some days I had to go delete >300 spam posts occurring over a few hours.
Xeda112358 wrote:
I am curious about what exactly will happen... will it be UTI with a Cemetech extension? Will all the posts be preserved and will all the accounts be merged as well? If so, that could be odd since I go by Thunderbolt there and Xeda here. Also, since I am considered staff there (as a super moderator), but I hardly hold a record for activity here, what changes will come of that?


I think that's part of what I was touching on in my previous post. I'm not really sure how we will handle the staff issue though. I think Kerm will have to weigh in on that. I suspect we'd be willing to field username-change requests for UnitedTI members

Xeda112358 wrote:
On another note, will this help cut down the spambot activity? I know some days I had to go delete >300 spam posts occurring over a few hours.

Cemetech has had fairly little spam over the years.
It will indeed cut down on the spam. The reason why UTI had so many is because UTI admins were almost completely gone so they did not bother installing any third-party anti-spam.

Also will former UTI staff that are still around like Xeda be made mod here too? I remember Digitan was also active from time to time, although I'm unsure anymore, and Weregoose, who was admin there, is quite active on Cemetech now.
  
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