Been there. Done that. FML on searching for programming help some days. Versioning is a nightmare as the way you "used" to do things is no longer relevant and the rest of the results are some asshole saying it is a duplicate question that was answered 10 years ago...that is no longer fucking relevant!

Sorry. Yesterday sucked. I hope today is less frustration and more things working like they are supposed to.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them... I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.

All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.

I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it's me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The answer to your question is that all the info is in chat apps now

[–] refalo 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Multiple times I have searched for a question and found a single SO answer from years back that was my own, with no replies.

I hope something nice happens to you today :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I lucked out. Success at last! Now I can continue to code furiously doing things I know how to do.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh, that stuff happens all the time. The one that really pissed me off was Microsoft 404-ing basically their entire KB system.

That thing was standing for so long you could still find Windows 9x stuff on it, and it was glorious.

Around the time they stopped supporting windows 7, they bricked the entire thing up and started a new system. Overnight, all the Microsoft help article links went dead. Find a good forum post about an issue that you're having and someone replied with a link to the MS KB saying little more than "this should work" followed by a sea of commenters saying thanks, that worked, but when you follow the link, it goes nowhere.

What a fucking waste.

[–] refalo 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

entire KB system

And right before they did that, they started removing footnotes from KB articles that only dealt with older OSes, so if you ever needed to go back and find something, it just wasn't there anymore. For example certain RGB packing formats were only supported on newer OSes and the footnote used to tell you that, but then it disappeared. I have been directly affected by that multiple times.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if the internet archive has a full copy of the KBs from before Microsoft dumped them. I'd love to set those up in a web server so I can reference them as needed.

[–] refalo 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

This is the way.

Luckily the postgresql docs have links for exactly that