Tamara replied to the email I sent yesterday.

She doesn’t know the timeline
for getting the threads restored. She said it’s definitely a priority, but other
things need to be fixed first. Also, she said if we see threads that have been
truncated, we should keep a list of the URLs handy. She is not sure how Houzz
will identify and fix the threads.

Thanks Mudhouse - BTW - how did you come up with your handle?

Laugh - glad you found Trailrunner's kitchen. In addition to her kitchen, I love her KAWs

a2gemini, we bought my parent's house about ten years ago. It's a framed house, but with an adobe brick exterior (adobe being bricks made of mud or clay and straw). Years ago, the road to the house wasn't paved, so Dad always referred to it (with affection) as "the mud house on the dirt road."

So, mudhouse. It pleases me to remember how much he loved this house. Although we sometimes (affectionately) believe it's trying to kill us with needed repairs. ;-)

Just want to add my thanks, Mudhouse. Thank you!

You're welcome romy718. I remembered your beautiful kitchen (with that backsplash, oh my) and did some hunting for it; the threads I found for you seemed fine. I think you avoided putting lots of pics in one post, and that posting style kept your threads intact. Thank goodness.

Thank you mudhouse for caring and for this great post and all your efforts. We all appreciate it.

I feel honored to be included! Thanks mudhouse.

*****Update*****
The good news is, houzz is working on restoring the threads posted here. I'm checking each one, and Tamara says they're still working on it. All of the text has been restored to each thread I've checked, and that's wonderful. Now we can see all the kitchen details people worked hard to assemble. Hooray.

The bad news is, in each case they've only restored 15 photos to the original post, regardless of how many photos were in the archived threads. In a few cases, less than 15. So, some threads are fine, but others (like 2LittleFishies' Yellow Kitchen) have lost 90% of their photos.

Deedles, you got 19 of your original 73 photos restored (you seem to be the exception so far!) Still, that means we are missing about 75% of your pics.

I have been emailing with Tamara to find out if this is a decision by houzz, or an intermediate step in the restoration of our archives.

More soon...

Thank you so much for working to get these threads restored Mudhouse and Tamara!

I wanted to pop in and let people know that there are still pictures of 2littlefishies' kitchen in her Banquette thread. It is not nearly as photo heavy as her reveals, but, there was enough there for me to go through and be influenced by her decisions on some of the details we were working out in our remodel last week. Phew!
2Littlefishies' Banquette thread with some of her beautiful kitchen pictures

Thank you mudhouse, Tamara, GW/Houzz....!!!

More good news. Tamara says the tech team has identified the issue with the 15 photos, and they are working to get things fixed.

To Tamara, and all the hard-working Houzz Repair Peeps (I mean that affectionately): we really do appreciate your responsiveness to our concerns, and your hard work. Thank you for understanding how important the past achievements of the Gardenweb community are. It matters a lot to many of us, and you folks have really stepped up to the plate by restoring the lost content of these threads.

laughablemoments, thanks for posting that link to 2LittleFishie's banquette thread! I am happy to see it looks intact. There is little doubt that we need our fix of Fishie pics, and it's good we won't have to suffer through 2LittleFishies withdrawal. Phew is right!

cat_mom, your Feb 2008 kitchen reveal thread is looking good again.

There are still threads being restored, and I'll keep on eye on everyone's threads listed above.

I have been one of those "lurkers" (which btw, that that name still cracks me up) for many years until somewhat recently. I recall admiring and noting so many different things in all of the wonderful kitchens being mentioned here...

It is sad to me to think us "newbie" kitchen planners cannot access the fabulous pictures of ones who have been where we have, asked the questions we have, spent the hours researching, and then proudly yet humbly shared pictures of there kitchens so that others can benefit.

Please, please... Tamera and whoever runs Houzz (which is great too) if you can fix this issue, I am sure it will be VERY appreciated!

I am surprised that GW/Houzz would have lost so much of the content of this photo intense forum's value. Maybe 'lost' is not the right word, because they seem to have the ability to restore threads. Restoring only a set # of photos on a thread whose whole purpose was to display photos, is incomprehensible to me.

What's worse, is the fact, that old threads have been stored on everyone's 'Your Houzz' activity section, but is only accessible in 10 comment sections. So, in my case, I have 8,000+ previous comments, listed in chronological order, but only can be searched 10 at a time. So it would require 800 clicks on a link of 'show more' to get to the oldest threads. With that type of organization, who among us, has the time to even search the old threads, to find those that have been truncated and are missing photos? And if we don't search for them ourselves, I don't think Houzz is going to do that on their own. So I think putting pages to each user's activity content on their houzz page, is important, so we can all check our own posts to find those needing restoration.

They restored one pic (out of 27 missing) on my reveal, last week I believe. I guess that's progress?!

My reveal has been restored--yay! Thanks to Mudhouse for the persistence.

lcskaisgir is right, her thread and one other are the only ones from the first group I posted above that haven't been restored (even partially to a level of 15 photos, although I am asking for all photos to be restored.) Also browniepie's reveal. I'll relist those links below, in case they got lost in the shuffle:

lcskaisgir Feb 2014 White & Gray kitchen reveal, lots of pics! (originally had 29 photos)

browniepie Oct 2014 Reveal DIY Skip if Sick of White Kitchens (missing text and all 12 photos)

I am checking each thread above (and some others I haven't posted yet, but I will soon.) Hopefully I can check them off as they have all of their original photos restored, past the current level of 15.

Denizenx, I would welcome an improvement like you suggested, to make it easier for everyone to find reveal threads. I've had the same experience, and now that we are all in a bigger "pool", I think finding things might be even trickier.

Prairiemoon, I’m struggling to know the best way to check
posts, too. I’ve been searching in Google and houzz, using the terms “finished
kitchen” or “kitchen reveal” and going by my memory, but that’s spotty at best.

I’ve also searched by a particular user name, with similar
words, trying to locate reveal threads. This is a crude method also, and not
very efficient.

I have asked repeatedly if houzz was going to restore
threads systematically, or if they could only restore those threads we report,
but I don’t have an answer. If they could just answer this question, we could
figure out how critical it is for us to locate damaged threads.

I have noticed the restoration of some threads I haven't posted here yet, but I still would like to know an answer to the above. Do we need to search endlessly for damaged threads, or does houzz have a way to "see" these threads and restore them, in time?

Also, is there a time limit to the repair period? Will the data be kept indefinitely, for repairs, say, a year down the road?

Clearly the answers to these questions are known. I wish they'd tell us.

All very good questions, Mudhouse. I have asked a few questions, the latest about the interface of the site, and replacing all the white and changing the font, and the response I got, was vague and non committal. I'm sure they are getting a lot of email and requests for changes, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they don't want to commit to something they can't follow through on. In a situation like that, with little communication or commitment about remedies, I would suggest we do as much as we can do to address the situation from our side of it.

I wonder if it would help, to post a comment to the Kitchens forum, requesting all members who have posted a Kitchen Reveal in the past, to respond to the thread to let us know whose threads to look for? Maybe they can also check their own kitchen reveal threads, since they would know what they are looking for.

In the event that there were 'kitchen reveals' by members who are not here any longer, perhaps anyone that remembers a certain reveal could post information that they remember about it, so we could look them up?

The other suggestion I can make, is for as many people as possible to email Houzz requesting they fix the method of searching the 'activity lists' on the members pages. If they would correct it so there are pages of comments instead of scrolling down, we could all easily check our own old posts to determine if any of them need to be restored.

Prairiemoon, I understand what you're saying about searching through our own comments under activity. The only way to search back in history is to scroll down, chronologically, from newest to oldest. No quick way to go right to comments that are older.

If houzz could assign page numbers to our comments log, we could quickly jump back in time...as many pages at a time, as we wanted to...to find what we are seeking. Try page 5; check the dates; not old enough? Try page 10, etc., and so on, until we find what we are looking for.

I have fewer than 1500 comments in my old gw account (I still need to get my houzz and gw accounts merged) and even that is tedious to click through. As a result the comments log is almost unusable for searching. Good observation.

Yes, that one 'fix' would make it 100% easier to quickly see if there are other threads that need restoring! :-) Otherwise, I think it will be too hard and things will slip through the cracks.

Mudhouse - I mentioned this issue on a few other forums and I did get a response from Emily @ Houzz. Here was her reply.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Emily Hurley

HI there, There was an initial issue with the transition where some comments were truncated, however that has been fixed for current posts and old posts should now have been updated with their full text. If you are seeing posts that are still truncated, please shoot us a message at gardenweb(at)houzz.com with a link and we're happy to check it out.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I did respond and let her know that without fixing the ability to view our older posts, it would be difficult to find which posts have been truncated, so at least they are aware now of the problem. And as anyone does become aware of any problem threads, they should bring it to the attention of the Houzz team so they can remedy the problem.

Thank you, prairiemoon2!

OK, I’ve been able to mark off 55 threads that have had all
their text and photos restored (thank you houzz!)

I have another list of 33 threads with restored text,
but the photos in these have only been restored to a level of 15 photos. I’ll check
those again after more time; Tamara mentioned in her last email that more fixes
should be coming this week.

Here’s a list of threads that are still missing text and/or
most or all of their photos. I’m posting them here so the owners will know, and I’m emailing these to Tamara, to make sure the tech folks see them.

artemis78 Oct 2011 Modern California Bungalow Kitchen (missing text and all 15 photos)

i_m_fletcher Mar 2102 Finished Kitchen 1 Year White Marble (missing text in three posts, and 13 of 15 photos)

annettacm Oct 2014 Kitchen Reveal My 2nd Time From White to (missing all 18 photos)

ArchitectMamma Mar 2013 Kitchen Reveal Traditional Quiet White (missing 8 of 16 photos)

browniepie Oct 2014 Reveal DIY Skip if Sick of White Kitchens (missing all 12 photos)

lauraed July 2014 New Reveal Long Garage Kitchen (missing 23 of 26 photos)

lcskaisgir Feb 2014 White & gray kitchen reveal, lots of pics! (missing 26 of 29 photos)

joygreenwald Nov 2014 Joygreenwald’s Thanksgiving Reveal (missing all 7 photos)

olivertwistkitchen Nov 2013 “Green” Green Kitchen Reveal (missing 60 of 65 photos)

zeitgast June 2014 Reveal White Beach House Kitchen (all 26 photos missing)

1929Spanish June 2012 New Kitchen Almost Finished (missing all photos)

talairys Feb 8 2015 The Reveal 2 Years Later (all photos missing)

Hi Mudhouse, that's great that there are 55 threads that are restored already! I'm wondering how you are finding the threads that need restoring? Are you just doing a search for 'kitchen reveals' in the Kitchen forum?

Is there a way to know if you've found all the kitchen reveals?

Yes, houzz seems to be making good progress on restorations! I appreciate it, because I know they are still working on fixing other things as well (like giving us bold and italics now.)

My methods are pretty crude! I've searched in houzz (the gardenweb side) and Google for terms like "kitchen reveal", "finished kitchen".

I've also searched in the GW bathroom forum for "reveal", but so far the bathroom reveals seem to only average 10-15 photos. Now that houzz has restored the text to almost all the threads, the main problem I'm finding is missing photos, and the bathroom reveals seem pretty safe.

I tried to think of past tutorials posted by our generous GW pros and experts, and searched by user name. For example, repair tutorials by Trebuchet. To be at risk, the thread needs to have a lot of content and photos all in one post, and some people don't post in that style. I found one Treb thread that was missing text, but it has been repaired. The countertop geology series by Karin_mt seems good; there were a few truncated posts, but restoring the text has fixed that problem. This is an area that could be further mined, if anyone remembers a helpful "go to" thread that might be at risk.

I think Buehl is still repairing the GW FAQs we all rely on.

Some of the Design Around This threads had long posts that were truncated, and people who posted boards in a linear fashion (Palimpsest, LavenderLass) had truncated boards, but those have now been restored where I've checked (hooray.) The main DAT problem I see now is that Palimpsest's images all came through the conversion as extremely enlarged and blurry. No idea why, they were fine on GW. I'm going to round up all the DAT threads and do some screen shots of this problem in a later post to Tamara.

Your question is a good one. I don't think there really is a way to find all the reveal threads this way, but I hope we can find many of them. If anyone else has ideas about how to search, chime right in! Or, if you remember threads you're worried about, post about them here, and I'll bet we can track them down.

Also, I will email Tamara later today with my request to assign page numbers to our own comments activity, viewable in our "My Houzz". That would allow us to search a lot more easily for reveals we remember commenting about. Maybe they can add that capability, eventually.

I don't think they will fix all the threads for years to come! Most of the FAQs were truncated (and still are), and just about every old thread I've seen that had significant responses have been truncated.
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I appreciate your hard work MudHouse, especially since it's something that you should not have had to do.
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I know you're all applauding Houzz for fixing issues, but it's obvious to me there was no real testing done prior to the migration of GW to Houzz. I'm in IT and I know (as IT people should know) that data migration is the most difficult part of this type of project. In most cases, it takes months to get the migration right - and the migration should not be done in production until all major (and most minor) issues have been resolved. Many issues we have seen should have been "blockers" and should have stopped the migration. Obviously this was a slap-dash migration - sorry, but that's my opinion based on the many, many issues we've seen and are still seeing. The truncation of the threads should have been one of the first things they saw if they had really tested first (and it should have been a "blocker"!)

.

Sorry - I am so frustrated about all the issues I've been seeing.

.

Just noticed, they've added "bold" and "italic" to the text editing - although the bold is not very dark (as bold).

Thanks @mudhouse for following up on this. Thank you for the honor of including my reveal in the list above -- it appears to be "whole" now...

There is some progress here in restoring the lost content, and I'm glad for the changes. I understand the style sheets guiding the color schemes are fixed by some corporate branding, so I'm not hopeful for a major overall change on that front. However, I'm hoping they will figure out how to allow nesting of replies and the ability to collapse previously read responses.

Mudhouse, I continue to hope that they will fix the ability to search comments on our Houzz pages. I'm willing to review all my old posts to see if any need restoring and I hope that anyone who has any significant threads, like a Kitchen Reveal, would be willing to review theirs to make sure they are intact.

I have to agree with Buehl, that you shouldn't have had to do it.

I'm still trying to understand WHY they truncated them in the first place, if they were going to turn around and have to undo that.

I am not an IT person and have no experience in knowing what is involved in this kind of a move. I've seen comments from those who are more familiar with what website work involves who suggest the changes they are trying to make take a lot of time. Which may be true, but I agree with Buehl's post here, regardless of the time it takes to do it, it should have been done before the move. This move should have been planned and preparation should have been made before the move.

All I can imagine is there is some reason there needed to be a quick, unprepared move that we are unaware of. Perhaps GW was running out of funds and ready to just drop the site. Who knows. Yet, it's clear that if that was the case, GW should have and could have alerted everyone on the site that they were about to close or move it quickly and we could have all reviewed our own content before the move and saved what we wanted to save before it was taken out of our hands.

It's discouraging to hear that the FAQ are still truncated. That contradicts what Emily from Houzz told me yesterday, that all the current text on the site had been restored. I know of another member whose been here 15 years who lost all of her content. She only has 8 comments on her Houzz page. That would be pretty hard to take. All her clippings that were extensive are gone. So there is another contradiction of Emily's statement yesterday, that all the current text on the site has been restored. That is a bad idea, to make statements that aren't completely accurate, which then appear that they could be making that kind of statement to appease people. It breaks down trust that they will do and are doing what they need to do.

Buehl, thank you for voicing - so clearly - the frustrations I've been feeling. I don't have an IT background, but while I'm working on this, I keep thinking...there must have been a better way to do this. So thank you for the comment, and there is no need to apologize. I've written about ten similar posts myself (being honest about my frustration) and then deleted before submitting. I keep trying to stay focused on the job at hand, because when I get worried and angry I lose my motivation to even try to help.

I am right there with you.

There are years of hard work here, from an ocean of talented people. Literally, years and years. Accumulated knowledge and a photographic library of hands-on information that is unrivaled on the web. Surely, this is partly what houzz was interested in acquiring. How they have allowed it to be so damaged in the conversion is incomprehensible to me.

Selfishly, I am very willing to put time into helping with this issue, because I used the archived threads a lot. But I'm sorry, I really question how much value houzz saw in our archived threads and FAQ sections. I can't help but feel like they didn't think it mattered much (as if our future with houzz was a lot more important than our past with GW.) Whether or not this is accurate, that's how it feels, to me.

Whew. That felt good. Back to work.

Buehl, I've come across some threads of yours that are still missing text, like these two:

buehl April 2008 Stone Information and Advice and Checklists (missing 90% of the text)

buehl June 2013 Getting More Responses (l/3 of text missing, format problems)

Would you like for me to submit these for restoration? I haven't so far, because I didn't want to step on your toes (I know you're doing work on some of your other contributions.)

Feel free to message me too, if we need to work out how I can help you without tripping you up on repair work you have in progress.

Mudhouse, I can identify with what you've been thinking and feeling. You do better than I do, because I don't delete my 'frustrated' posts. [g]

I think many members are unaware of this issue with past content and will figure it out later, when they go looking for something and it's not intact. And just as the Kitchen forums past content represented the work of many talented and generous people, I think that could be said for other GW forums as well. So it's a site wide issue. I know that many people on the Fruit forum have left and one of them has started their own site which already has a lot of GW members and a lot of activity.

The decisions Houzz and GW made really do make you question the intent for the move. I know some Houzz representatives had said they valued GW and didn't want to see it lost, but ….

It is very easy to develop a negative attitude about the change over. Regardless of the motivation for acquiring GW and the lack of preparation for the move, this is where we are. I will continue to expect Houzz to honor their commitment to GW and restore all past content to the best of their ability.

I'll try to help you Mudhouse as much as I can. I have my husband home sick today and have to finish my winter sowing, but after that I might have a little more time for a couple of days to do some searching for you.

Yep Gooster, I have you on my "restored" list!

Lol, a couple of you have mentioned the "honor" of being included...to me, it's rather a crummy club to belong to (the walking wounded?) and you guys crack me up!

I don't know if I should post a new list of the "restored" threads or not. I can do so, so everyone can click on their link again and check their content. But I know this thread is getting kind of long and dreary, and I didn't know if even more long lists would make your heads explode.

Let me know, if anyone thinks that would be helpful, and I can work on adding that.

Prairiemoon, yes, I was especially unhappy to learn about the FAQ sections. This problem is being worked on, but it surely is not all fixed.

Thanks prairiemoon, and take care of hubby. Tamara tells me repeatedly that the data is not lost, it just has to be "brought forward." So, I am not getting the impression that we have to do this within a certain time frame. Maybe we can just keep making progress on it.

(I actually have our master bathroom toilet sitting on our patio right now, and DH would not mind if I finished painting the toilet cubby so he could install the new one. Ha.)

One thing I should clarify after my rant. Tamara has responded to every email I've sent, with courtesy and friendliness, at the speed of light. She has not been able to answer all of my questions, but honestly I think she is sort of in the middle, on many of these questions. Probably not an easy spot to be, and I am very pleased she made the transition with us. Without Tamara I would be even more cranky (if you can imagine that.) :-)

I think you're right MudHouse - I think Tamara is caught b/w a rock and a hard place (to coin a cliche!) I do not blame Tamara for any of this - she's always tried to help over the years, I have no complaints about her at all - all praise!
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It's the "original" Houzz folks who mishandled the migration - Tamara is trying to clean up their mess! (She may not think of it that way, but she is and I'm very grateful to her for doing so!)

Thanks to everyone working so hard on this. My thread has been restored and it's good to know that eventually they'll all be restored.

Palimpsest (hope you see this?)...we've been looking at a problem in many of the Design Around This threads involving hugely oversized images, and the design boards mainly affected seem to be your boards. Here's a screen shot of one of your boards from the Google cached Design Around 9: Keeping the Golden Oak thread. This is how it looked in the thread, before the conversion to houzz:

And here is how the same design board looks now, in (link) the current version of Design Around 9: Keeping the Golden Oak.

The individual images in your boards are now hugely oversized, blurry, and forced into a single column in most of the DAT threads. So, the boards are almost impossible to view now. You made so many valuable contributions to the DAT threads, over the years; I would hate to have these threads remain in this state, if they can be repaired.

Tamara said it would be helpful to know the tool you used to assemble your images into a board, so they can figure out what has happened. Could you post any info here, or message me, or contact Tamara directly? (tamara.amey@houzz.com)

Thanks so much!

I wasn't using paint or anything like that. I was doing it in photobucket, and I had a formula down for resizing each photo to fit in a columnar sort of fashion.

Photobucket at one time had a "collage" feature as well and when I did tile backsplashes I had to collage and re-collage the tile until I got it into a repeatable unit. So the backsplashes especially would be HUGE strings of photobucket code. The assembled post, prior to previewing it would be a very long page of code. It was really only manageable because I had done them so many times.

So I really don't know if they are salvageable, for that alone, plus I deleted a lot of pictures from Photobucket and have broken other links since then.

Thank you palimpsest. I've passed this info on to Tamara, and maybe it will be helpful to them.

***Update, good news.*** The houzz tech team has restored all of
the missing photos to another 60 threads I’ve been watching. (And thank you, prairiemoon2, for helping me sort through archived threads for the watch list.)

Older posts (in our archived GW threads) are apparently no longer limited to a maximum of 15
photos, so we should be able to see ***all*** of
the beautiful details of the long reveal posts from our pre-houzz days. This is wonderful.

Thank you, houzz, for understanding how important our past
reveal photos are to us, and thank you, tech team folks, for working to correct this “15 photo limit” issue. And thank you, Tamara, for being so kind, responsive, and helpful.

I’m still watching a handful of damaged threads. There may
be more out there, but I’m finally feeling more confident that most of our
archived threads are in much better shape than they were right after the
conversion to houzz.

Anyone who finds a thread with missing text or photos is
welcome to post it here, and I’ll make sure it’s been reported. (Please note, buehl
is having to rewrite and update the truncated kitchen FAQ threads.) Thank you buehl.

Pal, the problem with your design board images in all of the
“Design Around This” threads appears partially corrected. The images aren’t
arranged in tight groupings as they were before the conversion, but the tech
team was apparently able to resize the images,
so your boards can at least be read in linear form as a vertical row of
normally sized images.

All of the DAT threads seem good, except for a format
kerfuffle on DAT#5 (reported.) Some DAT threads are missing occasional images,
but that was true before the conversion to houzz, and I think those are the
result of members breaking links or removing photos previously.

So, progress! I have appreciated all the posts to this thread, as I think it has helped houzz to understand that this issue was important to us. Hooray for teamwork!

Mudhouse, it was not until I saw this thread that I realized why my prior reveal post that was missing images was "magically" restored over this past week. Thank you for your diligence and working with Houzz to correct this!

You're welcome scrappy25. Thank you for providing such good threads full of helpful info; that's the important thing here. All four of your threads (Parts 1 thru 4) have been on our watch list, because all were missing photos at one point in time, since the conversion. Part 4 was the last one to be fixed, and I think now they are all good. :-)

Thank you again, mudhouse, for being on top of all of this. And thanks to the Houzz team for doing all the work to fix the reveal threads. Everyone's efforts are VERY appreciated.

Yay for mudhouse, keeping on top of this for all of us!!!!

Thanks for noticing this (since I hadn't!) Mine is still missing all the photos, although the text looks fine (it was always glitchy! :) ) I have them hosted separately and can post a link if it's not fixed shortly. Will try to remember to come back and check...

artemis78, I found your link in my "working" list of threads needing repair, and I submitted it on 2/24. You're right, it's still missing all the photos. :-(
Modern California Bungalow Kitchen artemis Oct 2011

Thank you for posting, because I also rechecked the last group of threads I submitted around the same time...and found a few more that are still missing photos and/or text.

I've sent a new list to Tamara, to re-send to the tech team folks. I'll keep an eye on the threads I resent today.

I appreciate the heads up!

artemis78, just updating this thread, because Tamara let me know last week that the last group of threads I submitted had all been restored. I think your kitchen reveal has all the photos in place again:
Modern California Bungalow Kitchen: Finally finished!

Also buehl, if you see this, your good thread about stone countertops has been restored as well:

Stone Information and Advice (& Checklists)

Thanks again, Mudhouse, for all your work to help restore reveals.

Thank you, mudhouse! (Especially since I completely forgot to come back and check!)

No problem! I'm sorry it took so long...Tamara and I kept batting that last batch back to the tech folks, and I'm happy they were able to fix it.