Our V1 forums
were lost to a forum crash. No backup. 
However, they are partially archived on archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20001214030800/http://imperialconflict.com/board.php3?board=1
Our V2 forums
suffered a similar fate but due to hacking. Again, no backup 
Yet again, archive.org to the rescue!
https://web.archive.org/web/20010815022119/http://imperialconflict.com:80/board.php3?board=1
Our V3 forums
neither crashed nor were hacked, but the Staff routinely pruned the forum, deleting old threads! 
You guessed it: archive.org!
https://web.archive.org/web/20080304005237/http://www.imperialconflict.com/forum/
Our V4 forums
are these forums, and I don’t delete anything because why would we ever willingly do that? And you better believe I have backups on backups.
I plan to script a data scraper/importer based on the archive.org results to merge a lot of our forum history, along with the existing V3 forums, into these V4 forums.
We won’t be able to get everything, but there are some gems worth recovering. Even topics that don’t have posts still have value; we can infer a lot of history based on who started what thread and when.
Vote for this feature to raise its priority and get it done faster!
but. But. BUT If these still exist then there is written proof of my newb days of yore versus my current chiseled veteran look.
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This is too high importance to put on the roadmap, not being in control of that website means the longer you wait the less chance of getting it / losing data.
If you have a way to automate the process, I will run it myself and star throwing it on this 10tb iron wolf pro I won at work.
Let me know if I can help.
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also
https://www.waybackmachinedownloader.com/blog/alternative-sites-like-archive-org/
there are other crawlers, it’s worth looking into these and seeing how much could actually be found.
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We can definitely bump priority on the scraping.
The fastest thing we can do is write (or find) a scraper/spider that can follow the links to crawl archive.org’s IC history in its entirety, and save it all into something we can store ourselves.
I’m definitely open to help there if anybody wants to give that a shot. The import that follows will be trickier, but the first step can be done by anybody really.
I have no idea how to do this, if you can post some kinda guide on how to do it I have the hardware to get it done. I work at a computer shop and design computers for a living, because of this I get to win hard drives and various other things so I have quite a few systems running idle that could be doing this kind of work.
V1 forums, beta 1:
Don’t ask me why and when I made it, long forgotten… but since I fear almost everything from beta 1 is lost, this might be the only stuff remaining… no backup but just a collection of some nice threads in the Universal News of beta 1 concerning Harkonnens, their enemies and their wars, usually in the old beta-1-roleplay style:
The First Beta Round of IC: Harkonnen Wars
@I_like_pie, feel free to download it (there is a link to the zipped version) and to do whatever you want to do with it.
PS: THAT is the reason why Harkonnens won’t be forgotten: we simply have the best nerdiest archivars *grin
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@Altruist I can’t thank you enough, I wish more people (including Stefan) realized back then that everything was history in the making worth documenting and backing up.