Talking Landscape Archive

[Thomas Turner]

The Talking Landscape conversations over the past 15 or so years are an important part of the Landscape Institute's history and should be retained. They must be in a database. This could be downloaded and, presumably, made available to members in a non-editable format. When the change to Talking Landscape took place the preceding online forum was lost. Please don't let this happen again.

[Abi Palmer-Greenwood]

Very good points @Thomas Turner! @Louis Varley could you help here?

Thomas, we will look in to this and come back to you asap! 

[Antonella Adamus]

Hi all, we are now looking into an archiving option for TL. The difficulty does not lie in creating a static archive (this we have already done) but in navigating copyright issues with the old hosts, Ning and doing this ethically. We are currently exploring options and talking to Ning to ascertain what is possible.

[Thomas Turner]

Thank you. Re copyright, my thoughts are (1) it would be surprising if Ning claims copyright in the content, because they would need contributors to have signed author agreements for them to own the copyright (2) re the ethical point, my suggestion is to keep the old forum as a members-only resource. Making it public would go against the principle on which members made comments.

[Antonella Adamus]

Thank you Tom, adding @Louis Varley to the thread. We will keep you posted.

[Louis Varley]

Hi guys, so my 2p on this and current progress...

 

In Terms of exporting

• Ning will not give up database dumps, we have tried to get this in the past to no avail
• They have an API to extract data HOWEVER they dont provide API access to forums, only blogs, photos, and videos
• Theres no ability to export data

So what i've done instead, i've running a scraping program (it's taken 2 days to run) but its essentially cloned the entire site, and so i know how a static, (no real functionality, just the content) copy of TL on my laptop, and on an azure webapp.

What i need to asatain is what we are legally allowed to do.  While your current, ning will no copyright or legal ownership over the posts, conversations etc, they will have copyright over their HTML, stylesheets, and javascript required for it to even be readable. I tried removing these but as @Antonella Adamus can confirm, it was not nice to browser or get around.

I've asked ning if we are able to host, a fully static copy of TL on our azure platform, without any mention of ning, with all stylesheets and JS minified and not loading from their servers.

If they deny this we may have to look at serving a version without any style or JS. Whatever happends, i will swap over where the domain points, so going to talkinglandscape.org will take you to a static version. Worst WORST case then we will wait till archive.org takes a snapshot and we will reference that instead, keeping a copy for our selves but private.

 

[Louis Varley]

@Thomas Turner Oh additionally, about keeping it as a member only resource, we wont have any way of verifiying who are and are not members, and once TL it switched off from ning, we wont be able to add any new members in the old way it was handled.

With the static site, it wont be possible to, for example, retrofit a MyLI Authentication so it sits behind a closed login page. I will discuss this with @Antonella Adamus as i assumed members who posted would not mind that it would be public as a static copy, but yes, maybe when they signed up, they did not agree to this.

[Thomas Turner]

A fair degree of protection could be achieved by placing the link to the static site within the members section of the LI website and if more protection  was necessary there could be a requirement for a members login to use the link and see the static site. This would not be a difficult thing to code and there may be provision for it in the CMS the LI is using (a search for User Login and the name of the CMS will probably bring this up).

Edited September 10, 2021 by Thomas Turner

[Antonella Adamus]

So, I am not ignoring the issue. I've been mulling it over for a couple of days.

We still have TL for another year (October 2022) as we've now paid for it and we might as well leave it there as a reference but keep advertising Connect as THE new platform to use. In the course of the coming year, I see two options:

1. We will have had permission from Ning to store the static copy and make that available.

2. The current version of the site will have become part of the 'internet archive' and be in the public domain, so we copy/make that available.

The important thing is we have time to look into the options now. @Louis Varley, would you say mine is a fair assessment of the situation?

[Louis Varley]

On 9/9/2021 at 3:47 PM, Thomas Turner said:

A fair degree of protection could be achieved by placing the link to the static site within the members section of the LI website and if more protection  was necessary there could be a requirement for a members login to use the link and see the static site. This would not be a difficult thing to code and there may be provision for it in the CMS the LI is using (a search for User Login and the name of the CMS will probably bring this up).

Hi @Thomas Turner, the CMS does not control anything around member authentication. We only use wordpress as CMS on our main website, and for campus, however member authentication uses oAuth Authentication controlled by a dedicated set of API endpoints on our API server which connects to our CRM via a client.

oAuth works by obtaining a time limited token from the authenticating server which must be renewed at given times before it expires. The token is used to identify the user logged in and request any information the site asked the user permission to share. To handle this you need a oAuth client to talk to the oAuth server and handle the authentication. As the copy we now have of TL is a dumb site, it has no logic. merely html pages, we would need to setup a basic oAuth client, with login / logout, and token management to handle this and register as a dedicated app with the CRM.

Sites like campus etc, (wordpress sites) have many off the shelf oauth clients to do this, and MyLI has an oAuth client i wrote but its intergrated into the framework. I've got no resource in place to do anything with TL so much of what i've done now has been of an evening. 

As @Antonella Adamus said, the options are around either, making a static copy available or using archive.org which will make talkinglandscape.org essentially available to the public anyway when it gets indexed.

[Antonella Adamus]

So, @Thomas Turner and @Louis Varley this is what I have decided is the best course of action (very decisional, me 🙂).

We will keep TL live for another year - no changes and we have already let all the users know to post on Connect now.

At the end of the year we will keep a static copy as reference and make that available.

Having explored all the technical options, this is definitely the one I think will make everyone happy.