
Almost six years ago, the owner of the first version of our beloved forum - registered here as "formerly_bossarea" - sent me the backup of the old forum, from the state of April 11, 2010. It was a real hassle to get it running locally via IIS and for years I have tried finding the time to make it available for the public.
For a full month I have been working daily to use the tool WinHTTrack to do a complete mirror of the forum backup. It was a tedious task, as the extensive crawling repeatedly caused the local server to freeze. But I kept trying - and now I can proudly present the nearly complete archive, which you can find here:
As you can see in the Wayback Machine, posts from 17 months are missing from the forum backup. Everything from after April 2010 can be found only in fragments in the Wayback Machine. But the mirrored forum contains posts from five full years!
A few important notes on using the forum archive!
- You cannot use the dropdown menus to navigate through the pages of the threads or forums. The threads have "Previous Page | Next Page" text links, but the forums have not. If you navigate to a forum section, for example "Boss Compact Pedals", only the first page is instantly accessible. That is why I had to create the list of available sites. Use the index page to jump to the desired forum page.
- The custom Google search is not yet ready, but once it has crawled all the html-files you will have the possibility to find some missing thread pages, or you can search for keywords.
- Some of the topic pages were not successfully captured by the program. I have created screenshots of those pages (those are marked in the index.html). As soon as the Google search starts working, you can search for the topic titles shown in the pictures - or if you have the zip-file of the whole forum mirror, you can do it in the file browser of your operating system.
- Some threads have missing pages, or some of the links are faulty. To browse through a long topic, like "Let's see your pedal board #3" (shown below), it is recommended to open the single pages in the forum overview.
