The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

[altenbach]

So I was trying to find some links to the old LabVIEW coding challenges, and for some reason many of the links (description & results) are no longer present.

Only two out of the original 22 links are still present (<10%!!!!). That's not good.

What happened?????

... no wonder that page now has a rating of 1 (1 vote). Wasn't me though. In fact the third challenge was about FFT and is not even mentioned, but I don't think it got any entries. Still, it should be listed.)

I hope somebody at NI can search through old backups and assemeble all these documents.

[altenbach]

Was just looking at my ancient factorial challenge entry. It calculates all 35660 (note that the first google result shows an incorrect digit number 35659) digits of 10000! in about 8ms on my current laptop and, looking at the code, I already see some possible optimizations. 😄

 

[X.]

One of the links on the page you reference is broken.

Searching for "challenge" and the actual challenge names on the webiste returns these other disappointing pages:

Prime Factor Coding Challenge

Financial Planner Champion (broken links there too)

The should indeed be some interesting code examples in there...

[tst]

At least some of this (including files) is on the earliest version here, but not all - http://web.archive.org/web/20130429135709/http://www.ni.com/white-paper/5174/en

[LiliMcDonald]

Thanks for pointing this out. We're following up internally to find out what happened and if we can get the content restored.

[Ben]

Please do.

I placed 3rd in the Dictionary challenge and lacking a page to prove it, I would just be blowing smoke.

Besides the post-mortem write-ups of the solution were good reference material.

Ben

[JÞB]

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@Ben wrote:

Please do.

I placed 3rd in the Dictionary challenge and lacking a page to prove it, I would just be blowing smoke.

Besides the post-mortem write-ups of the solution were good reference material.

Ben

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Yes, the interweb is a good source!   Nice to see you.

[Hassan_Atassi]

Thanks for your feedback about the documents that are no longer available on ni.com.  However, what you are seeing is intentional. In an effort to increase findability and search relevancy of our website (which many of you have also provided feedback about), over the past year we have been working to clean out old documents that are no longer deemed useful to the majority of our users.  We use a combination of web analytics and expert opinion to help us determine what content to retire, and the pages referenced in this thread are over ten years old and get very minimal traffic.   

That being said, I understand how these pages can be valuable to some of you, at the very least as bragging rights about your winning!  I have talked to our community team, and we have agreed that for any future competitions we will dedicate a specific area of the Community to house and maintain an archive of the results and winners.  Unfortunately, the pages you all are referring to here have already been removed from our internal content management system, and this there is no way to retrieve them.  However, I will be able to send an award certificate to anyone who may need one to prove their winning. 

[altenbach]

Thanks for the update. Site searchability is a gigantic problem and cannot be solved by deleting old documents. Google can do it!

Over the years, I had numerous posts here linking to the various coding challenges, and they were always hard to find by searching. So it was probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you make these pages hard to find, and then you are eliminating them for too little traffic. 😞 Apparently all my links did not help.

It also looks weird to have that landing page with all the link missing. Maybe somebody could add a red paragraph apologizing for the missing documents to make it clear that NI is aware of things.

Searching the site is still a complete crapshot. I was just trying to find the LabVIEW 2015 help page for "scale by power of two" and it seems impossible to find unless I search for "scale by power of 2", which gives me the 2013 version (why???). Going back to "scale by power of 2 2015" finally gives me the lastest version. Whiy does it need to be so difficult?

I wonder if somebody is interested helping create a community document where we collect the remaining bits (e.g. from the wayback machine and personal notes, etc.) of the old challenges. We could call it the "coding challenge museum". 😄

[Ben]

I have to ditto Christians comments about a self fullfilling prophy.

Please send the the certificate you mentioned.

I put a lot of effort into the code I submitted and if I have to settle for a cretificate to indicate that I was the third place finisher (AHEAD OF ALL NI developed soultions ) I will have to be happy with that.

I belive Bruce Ammons placed #2 ahead of me and I am drawing a blank on the name (maybe a Konstantin?) of the person that placed first.

And for the record, I consider the decision to remove and delete was a very bad idea.

Ben

Spoiler