Featured VAMWorld is Dead! Long Live VAMWorld!

As of today, the old VAMWorld, hosted by Wikispaces since 2006, is no longer accessible. It's replacement, VAMWorld 2.0, has been live for a couple months, and the vamworld.com domain has also already been moved, such that casual users might have only noticed a slightly different look when going to the VAMWorld home page.

VAMWorld was started in mid-2006 by Rob Joyce, now Senior Advisor to the Director NSA for Cyber Security Strategy. He thought it would be easier to have a wiki for the growing VAM catalog that it would be for him to release another print edition of "Fun in 1921," which was guide to neat die breaks on 1921-D Morgan dollars. His first post to the message board was short and sweet, "Just wanted to see if anyone ever looked in the message boards. Not sure if they are something we should use for VAM discussions or not." Twelve years of activity and counting have answered that question.

The transition to the new VAMWorld was made challenging in part by Wikispaces, themselves. Admin-initiated backups never worked, so I had to resort to finding a WebDAV tool that worked well with Wikispaces so that I could download all the pages (over 8,000) and convert them to a new wiki format. After downloading the pages, I then had to crawl the downloaded pages for references to all the images that needed downloading. I think this was around 30,000 images that eventually took several hours to download. For the new wiki, the decision was to use the Mediawiki platform on an AWS compute instance (two more learning experiences for me). The Wikispaces download format wasn't compatible with the MediaWiki (the chosen platform) import format, so I had to write some code to do the conversion myself. After lots of testing and fixing conversion bugs, I was able to get the entire wiki imported onto the new platform where it is now being used and updated. It is also much faster than Wikispaces ever was.

Two weeks ago, after a few weeks of radio silence, Wikispaces came through with a surprise e-mail pointing me to a JSON database dump of the discussion board on a Google drive -- 26286 threads, over 78 MB of text (close to the amount of text in the 2015 US tax laws and regulations, as I calculated recently). It had been feared and assumed that there would be no easy way to preserve an archive of old discussions. I then crawled this database for all the images that needed to be downloaded from threads and downloaded them. 18 hours and 10 minutes later, I had all 79548 images taking up 23.6 GB on my computer. While there isn't a chosen home and format for the old threads yet, the data hasn't been lost.

I'd like to thank people who gave feedback on the new VAMWorld message board and wiki, and invite everyone to make use of the finest (or at least largest) collection of information for any US numismatic specialty on the Internet.

 

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I had heard the website had been improved. Now I know why!

 

If I joined that website, I’d be asleep within the first 20 minutes of being a member.

 

I can't thank you enough for all you've done John.

 

Wow your hard work is DEEPLY APPRECIATED!! Thank you very much!

 

Nice message of support...

 

Is varieties that boring?

 

Actually seems pretty interesting (more interesting than the class I am in right now)
I like silver dollars so maybe I'll look into buying a VAM or 2

 

Are*

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the most boring and contrived aspect of American Numismatics....... Silver Dollar VAMS.......

I’m sorry guys.

But varieties, and oooing and ahhhing and creating “value” over a die crack or chip..... I don’t understand it.

 

And that's ok. You can go back to your Mercury Dime forum now.

 

Young man, bring that phone to me .
You can get it after class ..

 

Funny

 

I see your point

 

*

 

I'm actually not on my phone, using my computer

 

Congrats on all your hard work, Sir Messy. That sounds like a huge project, and the VAMpires will appreciate it.

 

Not every VAM collector goes after micro VAMs, and I certainly don’t. I find late date large cents easier to attribute, and that’s saying a lot.

However, there are indeed interesting VAMs.



Impressive cracks and clashes, huh? This is the kind of VAM that collectors are willing to pay a premium for, not a tiny hidden die line.

 

Young man .
I'm putting parental locks ( security ) on that computer and were going to have a conference, with your parents ..

I'll be calling them personally ( teacher ) after school .............

 

Remember what I said before about taking it easy? This is yet another fine example of when it would have been a wise decision.

You may not like or have any personal interest in such coins and/or the subject addressed, but this doesn't mean you should go out of your way to belittle it, especially when the greater point here is the sheer amount of work generously put into it by a fellow forumite. Something tells me that if you had done even a tiny fraction of what this man has, and had someone needlessly pooed all over it, you wouldn't take it too kindly.

Is that really what it's about, or are you making an assumption from a position of pure ignorance?

Perhaps a better approach would have been to start with the "I don't understand" part...

 

I promise you that I can retract any controls you add to my computer. Believe me, I got in school suspension for computer related activities