MegaTokyo Forums

Have been checking for a while, but http://archive.forums.megatokyo.com is constantly inaccessible, there's no ping.
I'm interested in old discussions, and some links lead there. Web archive does not have many snapshots of it. I'd be happy to read old topics.

kivandopulus wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 02, 2019 10:35 am

Have been checking for a while, but http://archive.forums.megatokyo.com is constantly inaccessible

The old forums were hosted on a very old and fragile server that was constantly going down. That's why we started over and moved to these new forums. Our intention was to leave the old forums up for read-only access, in the hopes that with fewer people hitting it that it might actually stay up. Unfortunately, it went down hard again last year sometime.

Fred has tried a number of times to reach out to the folks who have kindly hosted that server for many years. We're not sure what happened, but they haven't responded. Hopefully they're all right, but it has meant the old forums have continued to be down.

We may (or may not) have a tarball backup of the old forums. We're going to check on that. Even if we do have one, I'm not sure how much work would be involved turning that back into a working website. The old site was ancient. If we do have a usable backup but it is more than a trivial amount of work, we may be dependent on finding a volunteer who knows what they're doing and cares enough about the old forums to put in the work to get them back up. We'll cross that bridge when we get there though.

So there's still a possibility we can get the old forums back up, but it may also be gone forever. I would miss it too. There's a lot of good discussion and happy memories there. We'll try to figure out for sure where we're at.

paarfi wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 02, 2019 12:19 pm

If we do have a usable backup but it is more than a trivial amount of work, we may be dependent on finding a volunteer who knows what they're doing and cares enough about the old forums to put in the work to get them back up.

paarfi, I PMed you about this a few months back, but I'd like to state it publicly this time: I would like to so volunteer. I may not "know what I'm doing" in any useful sense (depending on who you talk to) but I know enough perl and git etc to be quite dangerous when called for. Even if it ends up being a text-only unlovely monolith, at least the content might be recoverable.

Apparently we do have an SQL dump of the old forum. There was some discussion about whether to set it up again like before or try to merge the posts into this forum; as well as discussion on who could and would be willing to do the work to make that happen, and whether we needed to start involving new volunteers like Darrin. Then all that got interrupted by the latest medical crisis with Sarahs's father. So I think there is hope, but it's going to be a while longer at least.

Best wishes for Fred and his family.

An update on this...

We've removed the link to the broken old forum. The current plan is for one of our admins to try to merge the posts from the old forum into a subforum here through *magic*. He'd be doing this in his spare time, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon. So no working archive yet, but there is still hope.

As long as the original forums haven't been lost forever, I'm happy. After all, patience is the most needed attribute to hang out here.....

If there's some real interest in getting the old posts inserted into the current forum from the SQL dump. I could do that pretty easily. The trick is not to attempt a SQL->SQL conversion. Instead write a php script that hooks into submit_post() for each post in the old db. Assuming the old DB is in an intelligible format.

PM me if there's interest.

hmm, I spent the last 3hrs getting logged into the old forums lol.. that was fun.. a pity it wouldn't let me make a new password but it will give me a temporary one lol..

Just in case it's of interest: Old forum is apparently dead again. Or at least it feels happy, and wants to go for a walk. (^_~)
Monty Python "Not Dead Yet" sketch from Holy Grail