Atavist export & email issue

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    Hi there. I am in a similar predicament. We are looking to recover our Atavist website as well. I filled out the form about a week ago.

    The URL: http://bulger.wbur.org/story/1977/?location=14096

    I am not sure what email address was used on atavist/creativist, but our WordPress.com email is (email visible only to moderators and staff)

    Cheers

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @wbur, I’ve split this off into a new thread, since the email uncertainty may be a source of extra complexity. We’ll check to see what needs to be done in this case.

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    Thank you!

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Thank you! While I’m waiting to hear back — do you remember any other address that the site may have been under? Can you check all of those addresses? Atavist would have been sending messages about the shutdown to the correct address on file, and that is the one you should use. I am guessing we’re not going to be able to do it without hearing from the account on file, so please let us know what you can find.

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    We mapped it to bulger.wbur.org back when it was creativist. The CNAME alias was http://www.creatavist.com. The route after the domain name, /story/1977/?location=14096 is all the information we have to connect it to some ID within your systems.

    I have no other information. If this is just a security precaution or whatnot, you can use the Wayback Machine to see it’s clearly our IP. Why aren’t you able to “do it without hearing from the account on file”? What sort of proof do you need before you can restore this content?

    Can you just tell me what the email address is on file so I can hunt it down?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Our team has confirmed your request is in their queue, so you’ll get a response as soon as they get to it.

    Can you just tell me what the email address is on file so I can hunt it down?

    We cannot tell you the email address associated with any account, no. Giving us the correct email is the primary way you can prove that you own the account, so for us to give the address to you instead would entirely negate our security checks :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    Hi there. Can you give me a sense of when I might hear from the team?

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    It looks like we last emailed you a week ago on 6/30 – did you happen to receive that email?

    Thanks,

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    Unfortunately no. Outlook is determined to mark emails from wordpress.com as spam so I may have deleted it when cleaning out my folders.

    Can you resend? And just to confirm, the email is being sent to (email visible only to moderators and staff) correct?

    Cheers

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hmm. I dug into the recent support request on this account, and they actually seem unrelated. We’ll ask again about the migration and let you know what we find.

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    I still have not heard from anyone regarding restoring our content.

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-heroponriki · Member ·

    @wbur: Thanks for your patience! The problem for the Atavist team is two-fold:

    1. They do not have an account tied to (email visible only to moderators and staff), so that is the wrong email address. That is your email address for your WordPress.com account, but the two accounts are not related.
    2. The URL you provided – http://bulger.wbur.org/story/1977/?location=14096 – is not a URL they can use. There also is no data archived at archive.org that we can reference.

    The only piece of content they were able to find on any account relating to wbur.org is the Bulger on Trial eBook which is already on your website. Regrettably, they don’t have a way to extract or export content from the old creatavist.com platform, so unfortunately there’s nothing they can do to get an export for you.

    Let us know if you have any other questions.

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    1. I am confused by this. We went into business with Atavist. Did they lose all of their business records? Surely there’s a paper trail that ties our organization to the IP in question. Basing the entire verification process on an email address that was originally used when the project was setup and ignoring any other verification information seems unfair.

    2. There are 3399 captures on archive.org for this site. E.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20130605141430/http://bulger.wbur.org/story/1977/

    If you use devtools, you can see a lot of original Atavist/Creatavist URL structures that you could verify against the original single-page app code.

    While doing this, I was able to find this: https://nprboston.creatavist.com/view/nprboston/story/1977

    That was probably the original domain before we used bulger.wbur.org CNAME alias for SEO purposes. The “1977” I would assume is the Application ID in the Atavist/Creativist database.

    The list goes on. There are many ways to prove that we own this content and have rights to it legally.

    >Regrettably, they don’t have a way to extract or export content from the old creatavist.com platform,

    I don’t understand this. This entire process was for us to get the content from the site that we created and paid for. Did they destroy it?

  • Unknown's avatar
    wbur · Member ·

    I know it closed. That is the very reason this correspondence exists. And the point about emails being sent has been made many times.

    What I find frustrating is that a content hosting platform has shut down and refuses to give us our own content after doing so. Sending emails to a dead/forgotten email address on file does not absolve Atavist of responsibility here.

    Thank you for your time. I am passing this on to Boston University’s office of general counsel at this point.

    Cheers

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @wbur, we want to clarify that the email address and date of your request are not the main issues here. We had extended the initial deadline as a courtesy, and you did contact us before that. Our developers have been striving to take care of requests that came through, including yours.

    The problem is that the data for the address you gave us is in an older format that can’t be exported in the same way. And, in looking at the unformatted data, it seems you already have that content on your current site in the form of an e-book. Was there more than that on the old site?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    it seems you already have that content on your current site in the form of an e-book

    I was just clicking around on your site, and I understand now: I had totally missed that the link to an ebook was a link back to the old site, and that all of the ebook files were linked to the old site, too. We were focused more on the data format than the files. Of course you’ll want those back.

    We’ll keep working on this for you & should have some kind of update before the weekend.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @wbur, I’ve just reached out again by email with details on what we were able to find.

    Please follow up there if you have more questions. Cheers!

  • Unknown's avatar
    ericasmith3a9723483e · Member ·

    The Times Union in Albany, NY, also hosted stories through Atavist, and we just learned that those stories no longer work/exist.

    What can we do to get our content back? We’ve had staff changes, so I’m not sure what email address would’ve been used with Atavist, but I can make some guesses. I know one project was here: https://timesunion.atavist.com/the-incumbent-advantage.

    Thanks.

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