Alas, poor CD forums of Old

[Yaldabaoth]

I do not know how long the old forums have been down, but it is clear beyond a doubt that they have ceased to be.  They have joined the choir invisible.  They're pushing up daisies.  You know the rest.

It's a sad thing, because we've lost a ton of CD's stories by it going down.  I used to love visiting the old RP and Stories sections of the forums and reading about the things people got up to before I came along.  I don't suppose any of that material was archived?

[Edge]

I snagged some of my own characters' things but that's really it, and even then not all of it... there's a fair few characters I either hadn't played recently when the forums went down or had abandoned completely that I didn't bother digging up information or old posts for.

I'd suggest maybe trying something like Wayback Machine or a similar archiving site, but since so much of the forum - like this one - was behind registration filters I don't know if the archives would have gotten much of it. Guilds and factions forums, staff forums, application forums, and all the other stuff that's not visible to someone who's not logged in might not have been accessible to the archiving spiders and thus wouldn't have been gathered onto their site.

And just think - back when we moved from CD1 to CD2, the same thing happened. A lot of the early design work, building ideas, and other not-implemented aspects of early CD were lost on that switch too. Kind of makes me wonder how much different things might be here if that stuff had gotten saved in the switchover, back when CD was still growing and expanding and getting added stuff on a regular frequent basis.

[Yaldabaoth]

Yeah, it's all gone.  Internet Wayback Machine has two archived points, one in 2007 and 2008.  Both will allow you to see the forums itself, and the threads in the subforums, but you can't actually read the threads.

[Vincent07]

I have archives of most of the main stuff that I and some others copy/pasted into a few word docs. I don't have any of the stories or backgrounds or things like that though.  

Sadly the forum got very unreliable and though I meant to try to save more content, they went out completely before I could.

[Yaldabaoth]

Is any of that stuff that you would feel comfortable posting up for download, Vincent?

[Vincent07]

As I said, it isn't any of the stories or bios or such.  Mostly staff notes for NPCs, any privately submitted bios, rules etc.   I never had time to even begin to try saving everyone's backgrounds, journals etc.  I made a note when I put this board up that anyone wanting to do so, should go back and save all their stuff if they did not have local copies of it.

[Yaldabaoth]

Ah well, thought i'd ask!