I'm insane and I'm doing an insane thing...

Had a look. Some creative storytelling going on in there. I bet everybody had a lot of fun doing that.

Hey everyone. I'm going to do a bit of old thread necromancy because I have a very important update on this project.

Someone (who shall remain anonymous) was kind enough to go through their old computer's browser cache and extract old cached pages from their visits to the forum! There are a few hundred HTML pages through which I have to sift but I've already completed a new parsing script and I've started to import these cached pages.

The data set, while large, is not 100% complete but I would estimate that these pages combined with what I retrieve from The Wayback Machine at archive.org would be about 95% of what was in the old forums from March 2005 to February 2012.

Once the import is complete, I will compare the totals with the totals from the archive.org screen captures and determine how much of the old forums has been restored. From the looks of things so far, I think only a few stray forum threads are actually permanently lost.

For those who don't know, I took the forums down in early 2012 (and briefly for a few times before that) due to inactivity. Toward the end of 2012, I was an IDIOT and decided the best way to move on and stop "living in the past" was to delete my local copies of the old forums.

About a year later, I felt like I had hastily burned an irreplaceable, priceless family photo album.

Of course the intense regret took the form of grim determination (wow, being overly dramatic here) and I got to work on re-building the forums system. People came back, fortunately, and then, miraculously, I found an enormous treasure trove of old forums content at archive.org and now, recently, have obtained an even larger dump of the data by someone who had read this thread.

To the person who sent me the data: You are a hero, a gentleman, and a scholar. I tip my hat to thee and will parse and import those pages soon.

That's great to hear!

Although I didn't want to make a big deal out of it I was disappointed that the old forums got deleted. There were a lot of good memories.

That's why it's so relieving that there was a way to bring it all back even after all hope seemed lost.

Just promise me that you'll NEVER delete the forums again.