Discontinued Magazine Index

I hope this is the correct forum.

The index is gone in case anyone here has used it.

http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?tmpl=tm_faq

Rich

 

With today's forums on the internet I certainly don't see a need to continue printing a Index.

Edited add on: Due note I said printed as in what used to come out in the middle of the Model Railroad wig wag.

Eliminating the computer index...not a good idea.

 

Oh man, that sucks! I have used it many a time as well. All it took was seeing the cover of the month in question, and I could find it in my piles of MR's.
Guess it's back to looking through each one when I need something

Mike

 

This wasn't a printed index, it was a computer based index that was online. The only online index of old magazines I'm aware of.

 

I used the MRR Index all the time to find RR articles and projects that were in MRR, MRC, and other RR publications. I have a good memory for these things but don’t remember dates.

I have collected hundreds of RR magazines over the years and have gone back to them many times before starting a new modeling project. The index enabled me to find my information quickly without thumbing through hundreds of magazines. The index went back to the 40’s.

Unless someone detailed the project on a web forum you will not find the article through a web search. The web is a good example of the phrase, “you can’t miss what you can’t measure.” THE WEB DOES NOT HAVE INFO ON EVERYTHING.

If you never used the RR magazine index you probably can’t see the merit in it. If you did use it you know the benefits of being able to cross reference a subject in 5-6 RR magazines over a 70-year period. So this valuable resource is gone forever.

Doc

 

Doc is absolutely correct. The magazine index on the MR site was one of the most valuable references available on the internet and nothing else like it is available anywhere. While I'm sure the dabblers won't miss it, for the serious hobbyist it's a major loss and about the only thing really worth while that was offered by the MR site, its forums having largely turned into endless chats that are increasingly only vaguely related to the practice of actual modeling.

NYW&B

 

I'm going to miss the old extensive index too. Howevery, the information is not completely gone. If you look under the Our Magazine->Back Issues link, there is a searchable index that gives the same article information as the old index for a limited range of issues. Complete with bonus feature links for subscribers. This means they were maintaining index information in two different places (one of which was a real time vacuum to update and had reportedly become an unacceptable security risk). Duplication of effort is one of the greatest killers of the ever dwindling profit needed to keep any company in business. Discontinuing the maintenance of the old, labor intensive, security problem index was a good business decision IMHO. Even so, I am quite saddened to see it disappear.

I hope that the editors will consider the offers I am sure they have received from volunteers to see if the older information can be salvaged from the index and converted to a format they can import into their current back issue indexing system. The key here is they are volunteers and not paid consultants. If the volunteers can accomplish the task, then we get back a valuable research resource. If not, then Kalmbach has not spent any money or time from their paid staff on the attempt.

I would love to see the current index updated with information from the old index. But that will only happen if a mass import can be setup. And that will certainly not happen if Kalmbach declines volunteer help to try getting it done.

 

Yes, but that only covers MR, not their competitors.

MR's reasoning is that the ancient software can't keep up with the modern internets and they were providing the service for free. They made nothing off it, so they couldn't afford to update it. I don't know how true that is, but I have a hard time believing they couldn't find anyone with enough time and database skills to update it to a more modern format pro bono, because they are hobbyists.

 

As soon as I saw the news, I started wondering that since Kalmbach was involved, how long would it be before they started offering it on cd or as pdf's for $.

Mike
Cynic, AR

 

Model Railroader Magazine Index... GONE

http://index.mrmag.com/

Having just used it within the past couple of weeks I was shocked when I found that the site has been removed by Kalmbach. For any seeking information on what articles there were about various subjects this is a real shocker.

 

That is a shocker! It is a great resource.

After spending a relatively small amount of time compiling the early Diesel Era information for the original creator, I wasn't happy with Kalmbach getting hold of it and less so now hearing it's gone.

Hopefully it's part of some site upgrade and temporarily unavailable or moved to a different URL.

 

Topics Merged

:boy: :boy: :boy: :boy:​

 

HEY!

The original thread that these all got merged to was originally in the Inspection pit wasn't it?

Typical Media ..err Moderator East Coa...er Liberal..uh N Scale! Yes N Scale Bias!

This is what's wrong with America today. Nscalers and Conservoliberal Mods taking away our Freedoms to not post in the Nscale forum!

 

LOL!

Yea, Yea, Yea...

Actaully I told the system to merge the two topics and let it pick which forum to default into. Seems even the software is N Scale bias...

:tb-wink: :tb-wink: :tb-wink: :tb-wink:​

 

If only the N scalers would venture out of their dank and dark little forum cave once in a while, they might of noticed the thread!

 

I have a concept I tossed into Kalmbach on reviving it, we'll see if anything happens.

There's just man-years of data entry in there that is lost. That was an incredibly valuable resource. Were there ever drawings published on Barnhart Loaders? Yep, Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazette, and then I ordered the back issues.

It's not a profitable exercise, but it's still critical. There are also enough techies in this forum (old DOS dudes like me and database administrators) that you have to think that this can be done, its just prohibitive for Kalmbach to do it as a paid venture.

 

Too bad they did not give you a warning before they took it down.
Some one might have been able to save the information.
Lots of information that will be hard to retrieve in the future.
I did not use it very much but found it very handy when researching something.
I still have the MR hard conies that came with the magazines year to year.

 

Sad to see it go - I used extensively to locate one article or another within my own collection. Now I have hundreds of mags that I'll have to categorize on my own.

BTW, it's interesting to note that according to Kalmbach:

"...the Model Train Index and its integrated software originally were written in MS-DOS language..."

FWIW, MS-DOS is not a language, but an operating system. Perhaps they meant that the software was MS-DOS compatible...

Also, what does "advancement in Internet browser technology" have to do with the database itself? Surely any perceived security issues would be server-side, and not client-side. If the information is contained in either tables or flat files, couldn't these be accessed securely via PHP?

I smell a rat.

Maybe we need a new (and freely available) Internet Wiki, reassemble the data, and leave Kalmbach out of it? Just a thought.