
Microsoft Restores Deleted Technet and MSDN Blogs - userbinator
https://borncity.com/win/2019/04/21/microsoft-restores-deleted-technet-and-msdn-blogs/
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jiggawatts
Now if they could just clean up the widespread "duplicate comments" issue so I
won't get Deja Vu every time I read one of their blogs, that would be great.

Now if they could just clean up the widespread "duplicate comments" issue so I
won't get Deja Vu every time I read one of their blogs, that would be great.

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nikanj
80% of the time something really gnarly is discussed on Stack Overflow,
someone links a bug from Microsoft Connect. Alas, all of those links are now
broken.

There should be a law against ”We are rebranding the customer experience, and
conveniently throwing away most user-generated content”

~~~
BrentOzar
They took down Connect because they didn’t want to spend the effort to make it
GDPR compliant.

Proof from when I blogged about it, but they reworded it as soon as it started
getting press:
[https://www.brentozar.com/go/gdpr](https://www.brentozar.com/go/gdpr)

~~~
kthejoker2
A wild Brent Ozar sighting ...!

~~~
BrentOzar
> A wild Brent Ozar sighting ...!

That's what they call me, the Wild Brent Ozar.

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userbinator
Things like this are why any mention of "cleaning" or "removing clutter"
always gives me a hugely uneasy feeling. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper;
and even if some content is only of historical value, that in itself is plenty
enough reason to ensure its continued existence.

~~~
SquareWheel
It's not necessarily just about storage. If old articles and comments are on a
different content management system, that requires hosting and maintaining as
well. They may even run on different languages or operating systems.

~~~
DiabloD3
No it doesn't.

You make a static copy of all of the HTML, archive the systems that generated
them as VM images, and then put a "this is archived static data" at the top of
every page.

You also fire every executive who considers deleting documentation for
technical products.

~~~
SquareWheel
I suppose caching just the output is feasible. It's not zero maintenance, but
it's easier than maintaining two separate systems.

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yebyen
It's really not cool to delete vast archives of knowledge, ahem...
[http://web.archive.org/web/20171104080019/https://deis.com/](http://web.archive.org/web/20171104080019/https://deis.com/)

I wish that archive.org had captured more of deis.com/blog, there were 232
fantastic articles there, and while I still have them, it seems like it will
have to take a great deal more effort to republish them all, than it would
have taken to just leave them all online.

This is on-topic because it was some legal process in Microsoft corporation
which decided to delete this, too. Not as popular though, so not restored.
Check deis.com today, it just redirects to the (admittedly very nice) Azure
Kubernetes cloud services home-page. It would have been great if even someone
was given notice and permission to tell web.archive.org it was time to crawl
this blog, first, so those articles could be referenced in historical context.

~~~
rahuldottech
If you send them to me, I'll upload all the Deis blog material to archive.org.
See my profile for my email address.

~~~
yebyen
I appreciate that! Thank you.

It is a jekyll blog, and there are many authors, which is really what makes
the copyright situation hard. I am working on contacting everyone to clarify
their intention, as it was within MS rights to shut the site down, and it's
within any author's rights to ask that their work not be republished, and to
my knowledge nobody collected copyright releases at any point, so there is no
person who can simply authorize it for everyone.

All of the few Deis team members that I've contacted so far, though, have been
very receptive to having their work re-published and excited to hear about
Team Hephy, which was created to continue some of the work that had to be left
behind by Deis, so that they could better follow the demand.

I want to do it in a way that is thoughtful and fair. It's also hard to
justify reposting everything when I don't have a plan to balance it with an
equal amount of good quality, new content as well. Maybe I need to bite the
bullet and take my SEO points, it will almost certainly drive more traffic to
our site.

Do you have an "in" at Archive.org, or would you re-host them somewhere else?
I'm more worried that when I repost them, they are still not going to be easy
to find, and if they weren't in the history of deis.com, that sure won't make
it any easier.

I realized I was definitely going to miss the content when I found this
post[1] that was just what I was looking for, about the options for schedulers
and what it means to have a monolithic scheduler, back when they were
considering whether to rewrite Deis on Kubernetes (they did, it became known
as Workflow). It came from the original Deis blog.

I don't know if it looks out of place on the new blog, or if it will make
sense to grow this one post at a time, I think I don't like this blog, it was
just thrown together one day when I said "we need a place to put a release
announcement." I like the material style better than anything I myself could
come up with alone, but honestly that's hardly a shining endorsement. Could be
much better.

> I put my commas after closing quotation marks, because that's what
> programmers do.

Your blog is really nice, I went through and found the webcam thing[2] and
just wanted to call that out!

[1]: [https://blog.teamhephy.info/posts/schedulers-pt1-basic-
monol...](https://blog.teamhephy.info/posts/schedulers-pt1-basic-
monolithic.html)

[2]: [https://rahul.webcam/](https://rahul.webcam/)

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vmurthy
The first thought that came to my mind was if Raymond Chen's blogs on MSDN got
deleted. Now , _that_ would have been a tragedy! The blog is still up fyi.
Tons of technology trivia and snippets there.

Growing up, JoelOnSoftware[1] and Raymond Chen's blog[2] were two great
companions for me while surfing the net. Knowing HN, I am pretty sure a lot of
you would have grown up with these blogs :-)

[1][https://www.joelonsoftware.com/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

[2][https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)

Old MSDN link :
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing)

~~~
kanox
I wish they could restore Raymond Chen's old CSS.

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iggldiggl
I did this ([https://userstyles.org/styles/121616/the-old-new-thing-
class...](https://userstyles.org/styles/121616/the-old-new-thing-classic-
style)) after the first blog redesign, but so far haven't found any time to
see if something similar would still work with the current blog, too.

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fencepost
Holy smokes that's a huge amount of institutional memory to just trash,
particularly without even allowing archiving.

~~~
mehrdadn
I have no evidence for this but my gut is very, very confident it was done to
get people off older versions of Windows.

~~~
nikbackm
Don't see how, only technical users would care about these blogs and they are
too few to matter, even assuming these blogs somehow kept them stuck on older
Windows versions.

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dao-
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454469)

