Workaround for broken links to old forum posts -- but hurry!

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I’ve discovered a workaround for finding the content in posts on the old MR forum before the recent change.

Find the link that used to work, go to Google and enter it in. Then click Google Search.

A search result will come up but if you click on it you will get an error. However …

If you click the show Google’s cache option, you get the thread, complete with all the pages!

For example, here’s the link for the very cool SD40T-2 step-by-step construction thread posted by NightCrawler back in 2004:

www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=1&TOPIC_ID=18962

If I just paste that into the Google search box and click search, then click show cached … I get the thread!

But the Google cache will–at some point in the not-too-distant future–most certainly get refreshed with content from the upgraded site and this valuable content from the old site will be gone.

I recommend if you had some cool threads with good content, go to Google and retrieve the cached results, then save the posts you care about off onto your PC (right click and select save page as or just copy and paste the text). But you had better not wait around – there’s no telling how long Google will have this information before they refresh their cache and all this content goes bye-bye.

2

Joe, You’re always thinking![:)]

With the amazing wealth of knowledge accumulated on the old pages, I just can’t imagine that MR Mag will let it just drift away. Surely there is work going on behind the scenes to allow searching the old posts. I hope I hope. Anyone from Kalmbach that can comment??

3

I tried to follow these directions but I never get the “show cached” option anywhere, but I don’t recall ever seeing that option. So either their cache has been refreshed or the page(s) I tried to call up were never called up in Google.

4

Texas:


(click to enlarge)

Just paste the old link in the google search box and click google search. You should get a screen that looks like above. Click on Google’s Cache as shown to see the cached page.

If you would like to try this out for yourself, copy this link, go to google and give it a try:
www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=1&TOPIC_ID=18962

5

Texas and Joe,

If I try Joe’s example, the Show Google cache option is available.

If I try an example I have, http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=61621, the option does not show.

It appears that if the cache option shows, you’re in luck, otherwise, you’ve been flushed [:(]