Update: AditNow

Royfellows

Royfellows

Well-known member
Area Moderator
This is a statement from me personally and has not come from any third party, although based directly on information received. My purpose is to put the mining community, who contributed a lot to the site, in the knowledge of the situation. I feel that they have a right to know, and in so doing, I can dispose of any uncertainty.

‘The aditnow website and its back end database no longer exist in the hands of its founder, and will never reappear.’

However, for or the benefit of those who need its resources, for example mine documents etc, these can still be found on Way Back Machine.

Here is a link to the 2016 documents page: - http://web.archive.org/web/20160304212059/http://www.aditnow.co.uk/library/mining-library.aspx

With a bit of fishing about one could retrieve whatever one wants.

Feel free to comment but I am unable to give any more information, so please don’t ask. I would also advise that it is best that no one tries to contact Simon Lowe.

I have written this with a very heavy heart. I founded the Cambrian Mines Trust at my personal expense. Simon was able to see me reimbursed through the calendar fund, although this was in truth by voting majority. In similar fashion CMT was reimbursed for the work in Cwmystwyth Lefel Fawr, again by majority vote. As someone put it, “We have to keep Roy in RSJs”

Notwithstanding this Simon was a firm supporter of my work, something which I will not forget.
 
Thank you for the update, Roy. I enjoyed Aditnow and always held it up as a shining example of an online forum for people with a special interest. The mines database was always very easy to use and navigate.
 
We will in the upcoming weeks/ months have our database going live for all the mines which we have the locations for . Photo uploads - historical image uploads & PDFs will be accepted .

Once this is up and running we will be adding mine locations onto this database , we will then be able to add files for these mines so they have there own photos & documents . Basically we will start rebuilding what has been lost .

This will all go into the hands of a trust which Roy will be a director of . Not one single person will “own” this database , also we are hoping to have namho appoint an appropriate person / multiple candidates.

I am very confident we will get lots of support in our task by everyone uploading !

Please feel free to fire any questions away regarding anything other than Simon , Roy has said all he knows .

We will re create a modern version of this which will be easier to manage , I believe a very important thing is making it user friendly , so others can manage it in the future . We don’t want something no one understands.
 
Hi Tom. I am the NAMHO rep for Cambrian Mines Trust so am able to wear several hats. In all modesty, CMT was an important step forward for the mining history and exploration community and I can easily see that it is being regarded as a model in many areas.
 
It is a shame aditnow but it's nice to know something concrete now.

I'm sure alot of us got into exploring via AditNow, I certainly did after a chance visit to Rhosydd in 2017. I saw the entrance and went home to have a look on the internet to see what was inside. AditNow is where I came across a whole community of people who explore and document these rarely seen places, not matter how obscure the mine you are researching is AditNow had a thread on it.
 
Buddle pit will have this knowledge one day Alex .

It is very early days and a few volunteers are making this happen .
 
I have worked out a way of automatically downloading all 728 pdfs from the library page. Its a bit involved, and I don't want to advertise it here unless I'm sure the original site creator wouldn't be upset.
 
Deeply saddened to hear that the AN backend is now lost, like ME before it. Losing the forum posts from people like Sougher and Twitch who are no longer with us is a blow, and I'm not sure I still have a copy of the trip report I posted after the infamous Middleton Mine trip with Brakeman...

On a quick scan through of the documents library archive I noticed several items that really shouldn't have been there, like the "Lead Legacy" report (PDNPA copyright) and assorted scheduled monument sheets ( Historic England copyright) which is something to be mindful of before bulk uploading here - linking to the originals on those organisation's sites would be more appropriate.
 
Getting the files is trivial and I would think anyone capable of writing a database to store them would be able to write the couple of lines of script faster than me.
The database of names/vague positions of the site entries (along with the number of images and hidden images per entry) is also trivial.
Photos themselves probably not.
 
vicarage said:
I have worked out a way of automatically downloading all 728 pdfs from the library page. Its a bit involved, and I don't want to advertise it here unless I'm sure the original site creator wouldn't be upset.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I had brain fade. I think I have everything on my system as I was downloading every mine document as they appeared. Copyrite will be with the person who uploaded or some other party, not AN.
 
@AR. Yes, agree re copyright. I think we'll have to have a copyright declaration when we implement a document upload page. And any bulk documents that come our way, we'll have to contact the copyright owner for agreement to host unless there is a licensing statement permitting sharing.
 
What type of size are we talking about for the entire pdf collection? I had envisaged the Buddlepit document library as being cloud hosted. However, we do have a fair bit of storage on the forum server which could be used for document hosting - at least in its initial iteration.
 
BertyBasset said:
What type of size are we talking about for the entire pdf collection? I had envisaged the Buddlepit document library as being cloud hosted. However, we do have a fair bit of storage on the forum server which could be used for document hosting - at least in its initial iteration.
Click to expand...
1.5 Gb
 
Hmm. That's nothing. We'd have plenty of room for that. It could be worth pausing the db work for a few days and getting doc hosting up and running.
 
I think the way back machine on different calendar days, captures various pdf uploads ? So by changing the day / month we may recover more PDFs ?
 
TomFerry said:
I think the way back machine on different calendar days, captures various pdf uploads ? So by changing the day / month we may recover more PDFs ?
Click to expand...
It doesn't necessarily capture all linked files when skimming. The pdfs are stored by thier actual capture date but the external link is something along the lines of the most recent webpage capture. They are redirected internally to the former. Most (795 out of 867) of the pdfs have valid links which might mean the others were never skimmed.......but if Roy has them all archived anyway it wouldn't really matter?
 
Ahh ok thanks .

I would assume then the file is so small because everything was stored as “registered user “ .

I say everything because that was 95%-99% of the uploads .

What we need now is a way to log back on where we got “kicked” of to retrieve stuff .
 
AR. said:
Deeply saddened to hear that the AN backend is now lost, like ME before it. Losing the forum posts from people like Sougher and Twitch who are no longer with us is a blow, and I'm not sure I still have a copy of the trip report I posted after the infamous Middleton Mine trip with Brakeman...

On a quick scan through of the documents library archive I noticed several items that really shouldn't have been there, like the "Lead Legacy" report (PDNPA copyright) and assorted scheduled monument sheets ( Historic England copyright) which is something to be mindful of before bulk uploading here - linking to the originals on those organisation's sites would be more appropriate.
Click to expand...
I believe miles still has this data and will be sending it over to us .

Chris jc has been speaking with him regarding this .
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back