Good to know it was possible to access the data just in case there was something worthwhile.Haha yeah, I remember there not being much. Mostly drama threads/really old posts. A user has copied all the content so we have it just incase
As luck would have it, I already wrote a crawler last year for AG that will convert the public posts/threads/forums into a MySQL database. I'm running it now and will see about posting the dump once it finishes.
Be aware that the backup I did in December last year is a perfect clone of the visual content of the site in a 100% standalone fashion (IE, you can load it in your local browser offline and it'll appear identical to the real site). I've just done a full mirror of the site again using the same process, which I'll upload soon. If you just want to make a static site mirror, that clone will function well in that regard. I don't have access to the 0th bit section to incorporate that into the mirror, but if someone is willing to lend me access to their assemblergames account who has access to that section, I could incorporate that too. I'll be publishing instructions and tools to help people backup their PMs in the next little while too. I had hundreds of PMs I wanted to save, so I've rigged up a more limited mirror that'll function to capture just that content fully intact (IE, images, attachments, and so on).
Check PM.
along with a custom built crawler that's auto populating a MySQL database, check the post in news once I'm done for more info thanks, yours wll be compared just to be sure ours is good before sticking on archive.org.
. This is no ordinary build of httrack, and I spent over a month perfecting the ripping process last year. For example, I made sure to rip all the forum index pages in a 5 minute window, then checked back on the site to ensure no topics fell through the cracks by a new thread being added to page 1 for example, before I'd retrieved page 64. I made sure every single page of every topic got scanned, and got scanned only once, and I wrote tools to verify the results. I renamed attachments, ripped all important external content (such as included css and embedded images), and spent hours browsing the backup with no internet connection to make sure it looked identical to the real site. I made sure you could view poll results, use the dynamic "arrows" to build valid page navigation links when browsing long topics/forums, and I even made sure the favicon is properly referenced on every page so that it appears for the complete site, even if you open it locally or don't host it at a root domain level. I had to make lots of fixes to the engine too, in order to make sure topics with unicode characters in the URL like this one got mirrored properly, as well as fix a bunch of other issues. The list of rules is so long I couldn't pass it as command line arguments normally, as it blew the character limit, I had to launch the process through code to get the arguments in. Basically, I obsessed over it and spent far too long making sure it was just right, and I've been through that process again now, with improvements over last time. I'd strongly recommend you try out my rip (with your internet disconnected!) before you consider hosting anything. I think you'll find there's not much else to do than drop the files on a webhost and walk away.
