SCS Help Center articles disappearing. Let's rescue the useful ones!

NickHope wrote on 2/8/2017, 11:04 PM

It looks like many of the articles on the Sony Creative Software Help Center have been recently taken offline if they relate only to the products acquired by MAGIX. For example in the Vegas Pro section there are now only 86 articles compared to 174 last month.

And unfortunately the individual Help Center articles didn't get saved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) because they were prevented from crawling by the Robots.txt file.

However many are saved for the time being in the Google search cache, but won't be for much longer! Here are a handful I have found so far:

I am recreating each article as a forum post preceded by "(SCS Help)". I'm sure those awfully nice people at Sony won't mind!

I'll also update the FAQ links that point to these articles.

I could do with some help here. If you found any of those old SCS articles particularly useful, please try and find them through Google Search and post a link to the cached copy (under the down-arrow at the right of the URL). Start your search string with site:www.custcenter.com to narrow it down. Try searching with actual URL of the article if you have it.

Failing that, please just tell us what the article was about so others can search for it.

Comments

St3v3 wrote on 2/9/2017, 12:28 AM

I think Nick should get an award for all the great work he has done here or at least free software updates for life!

ushere wrote on 2/9/2017, 12:35 AM

most certainly agree, but would NOW dearly like 'mark forum read'!!!!

john_dennis wrote on 2/9/2017, 12:39 AM

I downloaded all the remaining articles using Internet Explorer 11 Web Archive, Single File (.mht). Preliminary link removed to save dropbox.com space.

NickHope wrote on 2/9/2017, 12:52 AM

I downloaded all the remaining articles using Internet Explorer 11 Web Archive, Single File (.mht). They are available for local storage and/or rework at this dropbox.com link.

Thanks John. Wish I'd thought of that before the others got deleted. Those mht files open in Internet Explorer but it's not allowing me to select and text in them. I wonder why that is...

john_dennis wrote on 2/9/2017, 1:01 AM

I'm not a web expert, but on the IE View Menu you can select View / Source to the see the underlying code. Perhaps, Webpage Complete (*.htm, *.html) would be better for cutting and pasting. I'll check.

john_dennis wrote on 2/9/2017, 1:40 AM

This link should contain versions that have selectable text. Edit: Preliminary link removed to save dropbox.com space.

set wrote on 2/9/2017, 3:16 AM

Thanks Nick. This would be great.

For the videos, I have downloaded (hopefully) all of them, but haven't do anything more with that any further. It will be good if I able to reupload them for archival purposes, but may need to ask someone first.

vkmast wrote on 2/9/2017, 7:29 AM

Yes, many of the rest of the SCS KB articles have vanished in the last 24 hours making many useful links in the threads "not available." As Nick said here (point 4.), the new MAGIX Support "FAQ" list was and still is rather short. And as he says, it will be a lot of work to recreate the still useful part of the KB. I've sent him a link to the few (about 270) articles that I got, as I think he's the one that can pull this through. No mean feat though.

Note that Point 6. in the link above has a working (ATM) link to https://www.custcenter.com/app/answers/list/p/800,17

NickHope wrote on 2/9/2017, 9:35 AM

Thanks guys. Great work! I'm wondering which of these articles will be missed. i.e. Which are the ones which members still link link to? It would be too much work and a bit daft to re-create all 274 on this forum, as many are old and irrelevant. I've already re-created and re-linked the ones that were linked to by the FAQs.

vkmast wrote on 2/9/2017, 9:57 AM

The ones that were latest updated might be inspected first. You can still (ATM) use Advanced Options Searching the linked custcenter list and see Date Updated then. Some "classics" would still need to be handpicked.

vkmast wrote on 2/9/2017, 1:31 PM

The SCS KB is now down to 21 items that may remain there, as some of them are just updated.

NickHope wrote on 2/9/2017, 11:38 PM

So I've gathered everything together, done some sanitization, and here is a zip of 280 SCS Help Center articles. Grab it while it's hot.

Those with embedded images (apart from unimportant pics of Sony packaging) have an associated *_files folder including the images in case SCS take them offline. Those htm files without an associated *_files folder (i.e. no embedded images) get their css online from SCS, so if that css file gets taken offline then they'll look rubbish but still contain the same text content.

vkmast, I lost your numbers at the start of file names so you might want to keep your copies too in case you want to find which article a broken forum link was pointing to.