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Tech: De-trace threads
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Subject: Tech: De-trace threads From: Trevor Date: 24 Jan 07 - 10:46 AM Can anybody advise me, is there a way of de-tracing threads en masse or do I have to delete them one at a time? I've got a load on my personal page that I don't need any more. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: MMario Date: 24 Jan 07 - 10:53 AM as far as I know it is one at a time. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Trevor Date: 24 Jan 07 - 11:00 AM Cheers. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Scrump Date: 24 Jan 07 - 11:06 AM I confess I don't know what tracing threads means. I just had a quick look at the FAQ and didn't see it there (I admit I didn't look beyond the headings). Is it useful? |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: MMario Date: 24 Jan 07 - 11:18 AM If you want to make SURE you don't loose track of a thread - at the bottom (just above the "reply to thread" box) there is a link that says Add To Tracer. if you select it - then the thread is listed on your personal page as a clickable link, along with the date of the last posting to it. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Scrump Date: 24 Jan 07 - 11:30 AM Thanks MMario. That does indeed sound as if it could be useful. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: wysiwyg Date: 24 Jan 07 - 12:11 PM To get rid of a lot at once, RIGHT click the DeTrace link to open it in a new window. Move on fdowwn the line doing that as many times as you need to, then go back and click to close all the now-needless windows. ~S~ |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Joe Offer Date: 24 Jan 07 - 12:30 PM Hmmmmm. WYSIWYG's way is the way I usually do it, but I wonder if there's a more elegant way. The trace link is
The de-trace link is
You replace the "xxx" with the threadid, of course. Some Mudcat functions are set up to affect several threads or messages at the same time, but I'm not sure how they do it. I'm imagining it's just a list of threads, separated by commas. My personal page is garbaged up by over a thousand personal messages and a couple hundred traces that I never seem to get cleaned up, so I can't really tell. I'll fool with it and let you know. My first experiment failed, so it's back to the drawing board. -Joe, Mad Scientist- |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Joe Offer Date: 24 Jan 07 - 12:58 PM Nope. My Walter Mitty delusion of myself as Mad Scientist was a flop. My comma-delineated list of threadid's in the detrace URL didn't work. I ran out of ideas. Jeff can do anything with Mudcat, but I guess I'm a technological failure. Guess I'd better stick to the song threads. Maybe you'd better use WYSIWYG's right-click system. I use that method often, whenever I want to do multiple things from the same menu - right-click and select "open in new tab" or "open in new window." Then you don't lose your Personal Page or Forum Menu page every time you do something. -Joe, humbled and no longer a Mad Scientist- |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 24 Jan 07 - 09:29 PM ... just Mad... ??? :-P |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Stilly River Sage Date: 24 Jan 07 - 11:21 PM "Trace" is a useful feature, and I must confess I don't go un-trace them very often. I find hunting through traced threads is often easier than getting the search feature to come up with the results I want. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Joe Offer Date: 25 Jan 07 - 01:59 AM I forgot about my traced threads until this discussion, and then today I found a bunch of my old favorites that I had tagged years ago. There were some real treasures. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: JennyO Date: 25 Jan 07 - 02:29 AM Yes, same here. I couldn't possibly just delete them all wholesale, even if it was possible. There are some old gems in there - some of them predate my joining Mudcat and I didn't know of their existence till somebody refreshed them - things like the "Why We Sing" threads are priceless, and I would hate to lose them. Having said that, I shudder to think how many threads I have traced now, and some culling is needed. It will be a slow process though, as I check them to find out if they are worth keeping and get sucked into re-reading the good ones! |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: JohnInKansas Date: 25 Jan 07 - 04:15 AM If it's any easier to just delete everything, with some printers there's an option to "print table of links" when printing from a web page. With my setup, when I click Print, I get a window that lets me chose which printer, with a "General" tab and an "Options" tab. On the "Options" tab, putting a check mark in the box produces a print of the page (or the selection, if that's picked) followed by a table that gives the "display text" in the left column with the URL in the right, for each link in the printed area. This would provide a backup printout listing all the threads you've traced, with the URL for each, that you could refer back to if you accidentally detrace one you want later - at least until the cat tips your coffee over on the printout. (I'd probably scan the printout and OCR it to text, and let Word convert the URLs to links so I could "click" back to them, but OCR isn't 100% accurate - so I'd save the scans too.) If Joe can figure out how to run a multi-link detrace, that would also be one way to extract all the thread numbers for the ones you want to remove from your list. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: Trevor Date: 29 Jan 07 - 06:45 AM Thanks for all this folks. Glad I put a trace on this thread!! |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Jan 07 - 07:39 AM "(I'd probably scan the printout and OCR it to text, and let Word convert the URLs to links so I could "click" back to them, but OCR isn't 100% accurate - so I'd save the scans too.)" I just save the original HTML page.... I don't know whay they say you're dumb JiK... :-) :-P |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: wysiwyg Date: 29 Jan 07 - 10:17 AM Of course you can save your personal page as a .mht file from your browser, and keep it as a set of links to whatever you might care to keep, before deleting it all from the PP. You could do that with your posting history, your PMs sent/received pages by member, etc. ~Susan |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Jan 07 - 03:12 PM Foolestroupe - If you just save the html thread, all you see is the "display text" for the links, which doesn't directly give you the URL (and thread number) for the links. You still have to go through them one at a time to extract the thread numbers. With the "print table of links" feature, if your printer offers it, you get a full printout of the actual URLs, including as part of the URLs a list of the thread numbers (if you can read the URLs). Since Joe suggested trying to figure out how to use the thread numbers, the "print links" is the easiest way to capture them all. It depends on how much, and which, info you want. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Jan 07 - 04:09 PM In general, you can: 1. "Save As" from your browser. (Messy, sometimes, especially if the page has embedded or linked junk, since the "save" may be both a "document" and a folder with the linked junk. Links get broken easily if you move them around, and you can't easily change file names.) 2. Select, Copy, and Paste to your Word processor. (Sometimes drops linked images and such, and often is pretty messy.) 3. Select, Copy, and "Paste Special" as unformated text in Word, to deliberately get rid of all the links and "funny stuff" (Usually keeps frames and tables, but often is pretty "clean.") 4. Select, Copy, and "Paste Special" as rtf (in Word) to save the links but get rid of some of the other trash. (Fairly clean, but you need to check for dropouts.) 5. Email the page to yourself (from most web pages - some sites block this). If you can "save as email" from your email reader, this gives you a much more "stable" single-file save than just Save As web page in some cases. It's almost useless for browser email, but sometimes handy if you use a "real email" program. 6. Print the page, with or without a table of links. 7. You can save just the links by adding them to you browser favorites. (Note: they can be deleted from Favs when you're done with them, but people who don't keep their trace page clean probably won't.) Or... How many more do you need? Regardless of how you "save" a page, it's usually a good idea to save the URL from which you got it, especially if you might want to cite it in a later post, or go back to check for updates. Some methods above make this easier than others. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Jan 07 - 07:31 PM " Regardless of how you "save" a page, it's usually a good idea to save the URL from which you got it" I've noticed that some good web page writers (or perhaps the server) will embed the url into the top of the web page. Perhaps we are on different tracks JiK, but... The following is an extract of a single traced item from a saved 'HTML only' save of my personal page - traced thread section - the broken brackets have been substituted to stop a 'freak-out' ("Your post contains a forbidden HTML tag") by the Mudcat posting engine in the HTML... :-) {tr}{td width="280"} {a href="http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=98530"}Transposing Chords and Keys{/a}{/td} {td}{center}6{/center}{/td} {td}{center}{font size="-1"}29 Jan 07 - 07:09 PM{/font} {/center}{/td} {td align="right"}{a href="http://www.mudcat.org/deletetrace.cfm?Thread_ID=98530#tracer"}{center} {font size="-2"}DeTrace{/font}{/center}{/a}{/td}{/tr} Seems to be everything you need there - if I save the saved html page I can open it in my browser and jump to or delete any mudcat thread I want. [A long time personal gripe about the mudcat output is the large number of blank lines and other 'unnecessary stuff', but that's another matter :-)] |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Jan 07 - 07:34 PM BTW, ny saved file "personal.cfm.html" is just over 500Kb |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Jan 07 - 07:56 PM Oh, and sorry John, I meant to say that I have used the idea of "printing the page with the index of links at the bottom" before - it's very handy if you want a physical copy - I was just teasing you about your self-confessed complicated method of scanning, etc.... :-) btw, if you 'print' that to a 'text only printer' you will get the list of links at the bottom of that page in a file... Robin |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Jan 07 - 09:32 PM Foolestroupe - You're showing me what most would call the code for the html page. My browser does a "Save As" as a web page, and if I open the saved file it opens in the browser and looks just like the web page. WYSIWYG said her browser saves as .mht, and other browsers probably have other preferred formats. Since only a few stone-age remnants and a few who are paranoid use text-only browsers, for most people it's extra steps to look at the code, which is one way to get the "thread id" or other info. If needed, I can open the saved .htm file in a text browser, or view source in notepad, and see the code directly; but then you've usually got so much "garbage" that it's hard to read (for people accustomed to modern conveniences in their display of web stuff). There's no argument about whether you can extract a lot of information by digging around in files saved by different methods. It's a matter of what gives you the easiest way of getting what you want. If all you want is a list of the traced files, the printed "table of links" gives you a list of every link that appears anywhere on the page, with the "open and visible" URL that goes with each link and with NOTHING except the information about the links in the separate "Table of Links" portion of the printout. For some uses it's a fairly handy way of getting a certain kind of information, for those who don't have other favorite methods. It may only work with some browsers and with some printers. My whole personal page saves as a 52 KB .htm file. There are 178 "href" items in it, for 66 threads traced, which suggests that the printed "table of links" would have about 3 lines per traced thread, or about 4 - 5 printed pages. Viewed in my browser, it's about 3.6 screens. The "code" for the page, viewed as text in a text editor or in a text-only browser would print 23 pages, which I'd have to sort through to extract only the threadid numbers if that's what I wanted. (I wouldn't be likely to print it. The page count is just for an idea of size.) If you really want to burn up a lot of paper, you can also choose to "Print all linked Documents" from the same printer options tab, so if someone is foolish enough to try that, it should produce a print of their favorites page, a printed table of links on the favorites page, the complete printed text of all the threads they've traced, and (on some sites) a printed table of all links on the linked pages - probably along with an enormous amount of other garbage. I'd suggest NOT using that option (unless of course you're at the office using company furnished paper, and nobody else is likely to want to print anything for a while, and you're not likely to get caught). It was suggested ONLY because of Joe's thinking that the threadid numbers might be useful. For purposes of this thread it's USELESS until Joe comes up with a way to use the threadid numbers to "batch detrace" files. It's a "feature" I ALMOST NEVER use, but I thought it might be of interest to someone who hadn't discovered it. From the argumentative replies, one might think I'd revealed the archaeological age when you bought your last computer, or mentioned what a useless old fart everyone thinks you are. You should know that I wouldn't do that in a thread like this. I'd start a new thread where everybody would be sure to see it. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: De-trace threads From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 30 Jan 07 - 05:45 AM "The "code" for the page, viewed as text in a text editor or in a text-only browser" " If needed, I can open the saved .htm file in a text browser, or view source in notepad, and see the code directly" Ok - we've done it again - I only showed a fragment of the code to show that the web page saved when displayed would show you all you want - and it has the full urls to go to or delete the threads (one at a time). If you use the url for the personal page, you have to open in new tab/window, or the damn page takes forever loading all the time for each one you delete. "until Joe comes up with a way to use the threadid numbers to "batch detrace" files" Possibly the 'delete thread' code as current only deals with one thread at a time - and there are probbaly too many other tasks of higher priority for the programmers. You would srill have to delete them one at a time - I wait until the thread url reveals that the personal page is about to load, then shut that page. "you can also choose to "Print all linked Documents"" ...even I can see that is an impractical idea.... :-) "revealed the archaeological age when you bought your last computer" The nightmare of trying to get a useful box doing the things I want it to do using a minimal set of (and deciding which flavour of) Linux up is progressing... |
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