What Has Happened To The Old News Items?

[JetsetBkk]

I'm looking for some old news items from January 2003. But "News Clippings" goes back only as far as November 2003. (272 pages)

By the way, "General Topics" is 795 pages and goes back a year further to November 2002.

Are there any older News threads somewhere on the forum?

[Maestro]

Some forums existed from day one of ThaiVisa, others were added as time went by, some even within the last 12 months. I suspect that the “Thailand News clippings” forum was created only in November 2003.

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Maestro

[JetsetBkk]

Some forums existed from day one of ThaiVisa, others were added as time went by, some even within the last 12 months. I suspect that the “Thailand News clippings” forum was created only in November 2003.

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Maestro

Yes, I appreciate that, but I was wondering where the news items were posted prior to the "News Clippings" section being created.

Surely there must have been some news items posted before November 2003?

I've just searched for any thread title containing "Thaksin", and the earliest is November 2003! I can't believe there was never a thread about Thaksin in the preceding months, especially as he was prime minister. It's also a great pity that the period covering the original "war on drugs" is missing.

So maybe I should be asking another question: "Has the database been pruned?"

Any answers gratefully received.

[Maestro]

Google gives 18,100 hits for a search with “Thaksin” on the website www.thaivisa.com. Unfortunately, it is not possible to sort them by date or to limit the search to the period before December 2003.

We have to remember that thaivisa.com was started to give information on matters of visas, immigration and work permits. However, since posts in the forum “General topics” go back to November 2002 it would be safe to assume that news articles posted on ThaiVisa prior to the creation of the forum "Thailand News clippings" would be in "General topics". Unfortunately, a keyword search with the word Thaksin in that forum limits the list of results to 1,000, in descending chronological order, and this does not reach back to 2002.

A keyword search with “+thaksin +war +drugs" in the forum “General topics” gives the oldest hit with the time tag 2003-09-03 04:43:59. A keyword search with only “+war +drugs” again limits the results to 1,000, the oldest topic is 2004-06-23 14:22:12 but it contains only the word “drug” and not the word “war”

I'm quite sure that there has been no pruning of the database to eliminate references to the so-called war on drugs. Consider the possibility that in the early life of ThaiVisa less emphasis was given to posting news articles and that members in general were less interested in political discussions.

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Maestro

[Maestro]

I did an additional Google search on the thaivisa.com domain with “Thaksin” and “war on drugs” and got 235 hits. Again, I see no way to sort them chronologically. If you feel like it, do the same search and look at each result individually to see which is the oldest topic.

www.google.ch/search?hl=en&as_q=thaksin&as_epq=war+on+drugs&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=50&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=thaivisa.com&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images

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Maestro

[ovenman]

Surely there must have been some news items posted before November 2003?

No, there were not many news items posted prior to the advent of the News forum. As far as that goes, there was very little traffic on the News forum initially. My impression was that News really took off with people looking for information related to the tsunami.

[JetsetBkk]

Thanks Maestro and Ovenman for your posts.

I had assumed that news items were posted in General before the News forum was started, but was quite surprised at how few news threads there were. What I was looking for were any contemporaneous posts concerning the original "War on Drugs" (early 2003). But I can't find a single one!

I also did a Google search on Thaivisa for "war on drugs" and "Thaksin", but added "+2003" to help get posts from 2003 only, but all of the "2003" references concerned the "join date" of the poster. When I added "-joined" to the search, I got nothing!

I'll do some more Googling later to see what I can find.