Archived web content vs live web content

G

Georgefella

New Member
Hi. I recently contacted the webmaster of a site to ask him to remove a particular posting. He replied saying that since the posting is part of an archive from an older website (which it is) he is unable to make changes to the content therein like he is able to with the live part of the website. This surprised me quite a bit, and I can't quite get my head around how this could possibly be the case. I don't want to bother him by asking him to explain further, so I'm asking in here instead. Anyone have any understanding of all this? Any ideas as to any workarounds that could enable this posting to be removed after all? I mean, does some kind of very basic program need to be created to allow archives of this sort to be edited, like photo editing programs allow digital photos to be edited? Thanks.
 
Are you talking about a forum or a regular website? If it's a forum, he might not have permissions to remove that content, whatever it is. It could also be he simply doesn't want to remove it, which is fine too.

If it's a normal website, it could be he doesn't have FTP access to where the archive is kept anymore, or something like that. Again, it could just be he doesn't want to remove it anyway.

What exactly are you trying to get removed?
 
Thanks for your response.

The post I'm talking about is on a forum, and the webmaster is okay about removing it and has permission to, except that he says he cannot remove it due to it being in the archived section of the site, which isn't live like the rest of the site/forum. Bit of background: the post was removed from the original forum it was on by the owner of that forum, but a copy of the forum's content was moved to a new forum by a co-owner of the original forum before my post was removed, and now exists there as an archive, so my post still exists, on a different forum, but in an apparently uneditable state now as described above. Seems like a bad luck situation for me, although I can't understand why the archive can't be edited to remove my post (a second time).
 
I see no reason the owner of the site can't remove it. If the permissions are set to where he can't remove it in that section then he can change the permissions for that as well.

He's either stupid, or he doesn't want to remove it.
 
Further clarification: I think that when you access the archive of this forum, it may take you to a separate website where such stuff is stored, and that may have something to do with it being difficult to edit. But I'm sure they would be able to, for instance, remove the entire archive from this site if they so desired (I'm not wishing them to do this, just posing a point), so it seems there surely must be a way for them to edit the archive, if less easily than just going to a particular place in a live forum and hitting delete on a certain post.
 
Sorry, I'd rather not mention the website since I'm talking about its webmaster as well. But what I will say is that the address begins with the name of the site where the archive resides (and I'm guessing that's all that's on the site - just the archive), followed by a dot, followed by the name of the forum where a link to the archive site resides, followed by dot com. Not sure if that gives you insight into the type of site the archive is on. What I'm figuring is that the site itself doesn't have a forum format/layout, and that the archive is just copied into it in some basic manner, and that usual forum functions and capacities like delete options aren't available as they were on the original forum where the archive was copied from, yeah? Would that be why it's difficult to edit the content of the archive?
 
That seems right, yeah. Subdomain.domain.com, assuming that would take you to a separate site from the one where the archive tab exists when you click that tab. And I think it must be a separate site because the webmaster referred to it as the "archive site." You mentioned the word owner, but I've only had communication with the webmaster. However, he would have said if the owner was able to edit the archive. The only other option the webmaster offered was to set the site so Google doesn't crawl it, but he doubted the owner would be happy about that. I'm yet to hear back on that front.

Why is it that you think the owner (or even the webmaster) should be able to edit content in the archive? Is it not a case where it's like trying to edit a pic without a photo editing program? Thanks again for your input.
 
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