Looking for complete archive of this forum from 2001-2006, ideally a searchable one

[1980s]

I'm trying to find a complete archive of searchable posts that were made on the Total War forum from 2001-2006.


It seems clear to me that a lot of posts got lost over the years as the forum evolved.


So for example here's the archived thread from the Total War forum in 2001:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020302...ML/001624.html

We see that the user Tachikaze had over 900 posts way back in 2001.

But if we look at Tachikaze's forum posts today, he has only 4 pages of posts. It's less than 900. There's no way all of his posts from 2001-2006 got saved:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/searc...archid=1155211


Does anyone have any copies of the forums from 2001-2006 that can be searched for posts? Thanks.

[Ludens]

Unfortunately, the search interface is limited to max. 100 results per query, and it will only search the most recent posts. You can play with this by going to Advanced Search, then "Single Content Type" and doing forum-specific searches (possibly in combination with keywords). But this will only take you so far when dealing with the older parts of our board.

Unless our Admins have a solution, you may be better of using Google Advanced Search.

[therother]

In the early days we had a firm limit on the database size we were allowed, which I think was relatively small, few thousands at most. So a lot of posts were trimmed back then, why there's so few from left from those days, only about 3-4 thousand from 1999/2000.

There were also various prunings, I think mostly of the Tavern and other non-TW forums, over the years including in summer 2004 when we made the move to vBulletin 3 (80k post were removed). I think the admins back then made great efforts to keep TW content, particularly around modding.

[Montmorency]

I wonder if there's any interest or scope for preserving the existing database toward the long-term.

[1980s]

Unfortunately, the search interface is limited to max. 100 results per query...

Unless our Admins have a solution, you may be better of using Google Advanced Search.

There were also various prunings, I think mostly of the Tavern and other non-TW forums, over the years including in summer 2004 when we made the move to vBulletin 3 (80k post were removed). I think the admins back then made great efforts to keep TW content, particularly around modding.

I wonder if there's any interest or scope for preserving the existing database toward the long-term.

Thank you all for your responses.

I would like to ask you all a favor. First, I will explain what I'm looking for and why. I'm a 9/11 researcher. I collect as much info as I can about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their social significance.

A few weeks ago, a came across this thread started by a long-time user, Tachikaze, explaining how he used to know a 9/11 victim:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...ht=Melissa+doi

In this thread, he starts off saying "I wrote here a while back about my former co-worker, Melissa Doi, and her harrowing experience in the last moments of one of the two towers of the WTC."

...however, no matter how many times I experiment with the advanced search function, I cannot find this earlier thread or post about Melissa Doi, the victim in question. There's only one thread and one post showing up about Melissa Doi -- and it's this same thread of 05-31-2006.

I would like to know if any of you could try to find other threads or posts about Melissa Doi from this forum or any archives you may have access to.

It's specifically because of web rot that I became an obsessive data hoarder. Authentic first-hand accounts of friends and relatives of those killed on 9/11 really are disappearing from the web, despite the assumption that everything on the net stays there forever.

If anyone here sympathizes enough to help me out, i'd truly appreciate it. Thank you so much.

[therother]

It's likely this post: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...=1#post1139297.

I'm committed to keeping the Org online for as long people are active. After that time, I'll explore some form of static archive.

[edyzmedieval]

I wonder if there's any interest or scope for preserving the existing database toward the long-term.

Yes, we will be looking at options to preserve both the Org in it's current state and also as a database for long-term. We are not going anywhere, this will be here for a long time.