Backtype Saves Our Bacon: Comments Revived From The Dead

from the thanks! dept

So, yesterday morning, we screwed up and accidentally deleted all the comments on Techdirt. We were able to pull a backup and get back most of them, but we were still missing 11 hours worth of comments from about midnight to 11am. A little while after posting our apology I got an email from Chris Golda, who I'd actually just met a couple weeks ago at a networking event in Silicon Valley. Chris is one of the guys behind BackType, a startup that is a comment search engine. He mentioned that BackType probably had a bunch of the missing comments in its database, and offered to share a data dump. In actuality, it looks like BackType had almost all of the missing comments -- and they've now been restored. The only thing we didn't have were the comment titles, but otherwise most of the missing comments are back.

So, here's a huge thank you to Chris and Mike at BackType for reviving our dead comments. Way to prove the absolute awesomeness of your product. Remember a few months back when we wrote about some silly argument that some bloggers were making about how it was important to determine who owned the copyright on blog comments? At the time, we pointed out how ridiculous that was -- and I think this proves it. Under traditional copyright laws, some might say that BackType violated copyright laws, but in actuality, they provided a huge service to us in doing so.

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