Thanks to
www.archive.org, a lot of the old Omnimaga board content now seems avaliable. Hoping it's not just one of their servers being on steroids to eventually slow down again, only the front page from many dates was avaliable. It appears that the fastest way to access the old Omnimaga forums front page for now is still through the
July 15th 2007 cache of www.omnimaga.org. From there you can access some areas of the site, which, in some cases, will be a more recent cache of it, sometimes even landing on the Christmas skin.
What this means for now is that there are chances that the community articles and award sections will be resurected (altough the Omnimaga v3 color pixel art contest results will be missing). Also you can browse through some of the forum sections, like the first page of news articles and you can even open some of the topics. If something is missing from the July 15th cache you can browse through another cached version in
the list (there's an older list
there too), but they are on much slower servers with page loading time going up to 2 minutes.
For those who feel nostalgic, want to read some old stuff (providing it's avaliable) or just want to see how the old website looked like they can go check there. You will also notice if you can access most of the old board that we were alerady late on
web standards, which is why today we're retrieving all the time lost.
For now we don't know how the old sections will be re-added to this website. For now the topics are located in the hidden staff forum section.
About the old website, when it will be backed up (no specific date for that, it will take months before Invisionfree process the 3 years queue of board restorations they have) we will decide what we will do with it. There are two possible plans:
Plan A: If a merge with the current website is possible, all posts from the old website will be added to this one in the appropriate section, but all old accounts will be deleted. Post counts will be added to the currently existing accounts and post counts of old members who did not register yet will be posted in the staff section until they register. Don't be surprised if one day my post count suddently jumps by 11000. It will still be impossible to find posts by a specific member made between May 12th 2005 and December 31th 2007, but it will be possible to search for these posts through the search engine.
To merge, we will need to buy the old forums databases from Invisionfree and convert them to SMF then MyBB. Merging two forums is only possible with MyBB merge system and there are no direct IPB 1.3 to MyBB converters avaliable, which is why we would need to pass through SMF in the process. Afterward we will need to convert this board to MyBB. Then all databases can be merged then converted back to SMF. There are no guarantees that file attachments in posts will remain. Also, a conversion of this board to MyBB may be impossible because of the download system mod in place. This take us to Plan B.
Plan B: If buying the databases from Invisionfree is too expensive, if a conversion of this currently used board is impossible for any reason (errors, deletion of downloaded files due to it being a mod, etc) or if merging all MyBB databases doesn't work, then when the Invisionfree board is restored it will remain as it is now, but registrations will be disabled, same for all members priviledges (posting, editing account, sig, staff priviledges, etc). Downloadable files and screenshots will remain there as long as my webspace on United-TI exists. There are chances that post count on the current board will be altered to add the one from the old board and a sub forum linking to the old board will be added to the sub forum list.
During conversion/merging process, a copy of this database will be made to make sure nothing bad happens and to ensure this board remain online during the entire process, which could take a while depending of what complications get in the way.
