current board versus old board

[greylok]

Are the old boards permanently gone/vanished/destroyed/deleted?

Or is there an archive of sorts that can be accessed?

Looking for old things, and wondering if any of the myriad of information, fanficition, insightful discussions, and whimsical inanity can ever be accessed again?

[Mendrugo]

There was a massive hack of the boards in 2011 that resulted in the total loss of all material from 2001-2011.  I believe it was ultimately traced back to Lithuania, which resulted in the source city being hit with a nuke during Case White.

[Daryk]

Some of us were able to salvage a few things from the temporary archive that was created, but it was shutdown eventually and was still missing stuff.

I'm sure the Lithuanian hit was just a proxy for something further East...

[Xotl]

There were three or four previous boards, all but one under the aegis of a single admin.  The boards tended to go through catastrophic crashes every few years in which everything would be lost, before a switch to a new board and repeating the process.  I made repeated attempts to secure copies of the previous iterations but the previous admin was not cooperative, and he has since died so it is unlikely that we'll ever see anything beyond the very limited amount available on the Internet Archive.

[Daryk]

Yikes!  I hadn't heard we'd lost an Admin...

[Xotl]

He was not a current forum admin, and hadn't been since 2011 or so.

[Daryk]

Ah, roger... thanks for the clarification!

[Knightmare]

There were three or four previous boards, all but one under the aegis of a single admin.  The boards tended to go through catastrophic crashes every few years in which everything would be lost, before a switch to a new board and repeating the process.  I made repeated attempts to secure copies of the previous iterations but the previous admin was not cooperative, and he has since died so it is unlikely that we'll ever see anything beyond the very limited amount available on the Internet Archive.

Wait, I missed this message. You have previous copies of the forum? We should connect at some point in the nearish future if you still have access to them.

[Daryk]

Please do reconnect on that!  I (at least) would still be interested in seeing what else I can salvage from at least the previous iteration...

[Xotl]

Wait, I missed this message. You have previous copies of the forum? We should connect at some point in the nearish future if you still have access to them.

No: I tried several times to get them, but he never answered my messages.  The most I have is a March 2010 snapshot of just the Errata and Rules Question forums: very useful at one point when putting together some of the initial huge errata releases I did, but with not much in the way of board culture or everyday conversations that I wanted to preserve (though the sigs and whatnot are there).