Wow, I never expected this to happen. This is pretty cool
I guess today I'll be nostalgia-binging through the old archives

wow, this is great.  You you think the posts can be integrated into the new forum?

The trick to include all posts would be to:

1) Manually update each remaining user post counts to merge their original account one with their current ones. Update their account with their old join date.

2) Purchase the databases from Invisionfree or use a screenscrapping script to extract the posts from the boards. Note: I was planning to pay since the beginning, assuming the restoration was not expensive (finally the latter was free). The former gives us an InvisionBoard 1.3.1 database and the latter gives us an SMF or PHPBB board (although if Jimbauwens uses his script, then we just get HTML static pages). NOTE: There are no conversion purchase for Zetaboards, so for that a screenscrapping script would be needed.

3) Convert the boards to SMF, then upgrade to SMF 1.1.16, if either are needed.

4) To save work, empty the PM, members and attachments tables if needed. Basically get rid of every account on the 3 databases.

5) Install every Omnimaga mods on the other SMF boards, so when importing the posts after doing number #5, no error about mismatching amount of columns or something occur (for example, the post rating system adds extra rows to the messages table).

6) Turn current board offline and do a backup

7) Run an MySQL query through database 1 (z7.invisionfree.com/Omnimaga) to increment post IDs by 300000, topic IDs by 30000 and so on. Do the same with database 2 (z9.invisionfree), but with 350000 and 35000 respectively. Same for database 3 (the Zetaboards), with 400000 and 40000 and finally the current database, with 500000 and 50000. This will ensure no post ID overlaps or something.

Now all links pointing to specific threads or posts on the current board are broken. What to do? Put in some server script, .htaccess or DNS setting (not sure what it would have to be) that will cause people to be redirected to higher post IDs whenever they click or type a link to an original post ID. So for example, http://ourl.ca/15110/282987 would automatically redirect to http://ourl.ca/65110/782987 . For the Invisionfree links, we don't really care since it's old.

9) Import the older data in the current board database.

10) The main issue here is to not forget to increment a single member ID. For example if you ever forget on one database to increment board categories, then they won't be imported or they will overwrite

11) Now you got a shitload of extra board sub-forums! Simply move their respective content (I could do that) to the current board ones (for example, News topic from the 2006-07 sub-forum to news) then get rid of duplicate categories. For the 2005-06 database, there is only one category, so just leave that category intact while I myself move the old topics back to their respective sections (as news editor I can help moving topics).

12) Edit the topic start dates of the old 2004-05 news articles to the original ones at http://www.omnimaga.org/oldsite/index_v3.html

12) Fix possible messed up post counts

In  other words, yes there is a bunch of work to do, especially considering our installed board mods installed extra SQL fields to our tables.

Great news!  Nice to see this info back!

Oh wait right, HOMER-16, not Jonius.

Also from the 2008 site I still have the spam from the anon raid and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else still had theirs archived too. I still also got 5 of the anon posts located in the spam section (there were over 50, but I deleted most back then)



(Also that board system was so hard to edit, CSS-wise. X.x)

EDIT the remaining spam topics http://s1.zetaboards.com/omnimaga/forum/64561/

Indeed and it would be easier to access. Also it would be nice to be able to search through those posts, since the Invisionfree search engine has been disabled since 2002.