Who is responsible for the deletion of the CODOH Forum (2002-2023)?

[Sannhet]

I have been away and was shocked today to learn what happened.

As best I can tell, CODOH was hit by insider sabotage following an internal dispute in winter 2023-24, with one of the individuals involved seeming to act erratically and seizing control of passwords and files, or the like. Tragically, the CODOH Forum went down permanently. There was so much good material on there. Including many hours of my own devoted to producing material that appeared there. It was really a great great resource. On any topic, you could use the search-bar and come up with something.

The backup "mirror" site (https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=2) does not work properly for me. Since learning of the death of the old forum, I have been able to access only a small portion of material. Maybe 1%. Anything beyond that comes up blank. Maybe, I hope, this is a mere technical problem on the outward facing end and the material remains preserved somehow.

(I've gone back and saved a few things from Archive.org and Archive.is, and found a few things. Some of the better material I recall in my memory I've not been able to access. Others I've forgotten about and now may never see again. As usual with all digital content, it's a lesson to save things elsewhere, including printed 'hard' copies if necessary.)

So who is responsible for this?

[Stubble]

Michael Santomauro

https://codoh.com/library/document/tota ... urrection/

As reported in last issue’s editorial, the situation at CODOH and Castle Hill had become critical, after one of CODOH’s board members, Michael Santomauro, until mid-December 2023 manager of Castle Hill, had seized all of Castle Hill’s company assets, and had taken exclusive control of domain-name and hosting accounts, using this as “leverage” (his word) to extort $300,000 from CODOH.

Some further reading;

https://codoh.com/library/document/we-are-under-siege/

The worst attacks Holocaust revisionism has ever suffered always came from within: The in-fighting between the Institute for Historical Review and Willis Carto (the founder and main financier of the IHR) starting in the mid-1993. This had been triggered by a 7+million-dollar bequest of the Farrel Estate to the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Inc. (the IHR’s umbrella organization). The resulting legal battle squandered these millions mostly with legal fees, and destroyed the IHR as a viable organization. Next came the extortion attempts by Michael Santomauro in late 2023/early 2024, who, as a board member of the Bradley Smith 2014 Charitable Trust (also doing business as the Committee for Open Debate on the HOLOCAUST, CODOH), gained control of almost all of CODOH’s essential assets (including its subsidiary Castlehill Publishing).

[pilgrimofdark]

I'm not sure how to fill gaps in the existing forum archive, but the Wayback Machine CDX Server API can show all pages it has indexed for a domain.

http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?u ... pse=urlkey

RODOH is also there:
http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?u ... pse=urlkey

It might not have copies of deep pages, but whatever is available could be scraped and dumped somewhere?

[Stubble]

I'm not sure how to fill gaps in the existing forum archive, but the Wayback Machine CDX Server API can show all pages it has indexed for a domain.

http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?u ... pse=urlkey

RODOH is also there:
http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?u ... pse=urlkey

It might not have copies of deep pages, but whatever is available could be scraped and dumped somewhere?

What is extant in the archive on this site is the culmination of scraping preformed by Fangers and kindly put together for posterity. While incomplete, it is the best that could be done from what I can gather. I personally thank him for his efforts in the preservation of the old forum such as it is and commend him as well.

[Sannhet]

No one trusted had a full copy of the forum archive (backup)?

Is the full database being "held hostage" by Michael Santumauro? Has he 'snapped' in some way and prefers to trade that rich resource as a pawn in a hopeless vendetta?

_________

Some search engines are still findings results for forum.codoh.com. But, clicking on them, the page just goes dead. "This site can't be reached."

https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aforum.codoh.com

It's a shame search engines don't do easily accessible "caches" anymore.

[Sannhet]

I've been able to make some individual page-saves from Archive.org material, things I haven't been able to access on the backup site.

Here is one, for example:

(early September 2020)
"Germany cites Holocaust in new ethnic exemption to COVID entry restrictions: Jews can enter freely; others remain banned"
https://web.archive.org/web/20200925050 ... =2&t=13534

The thousands of threads in that forum were a useful, searchable record of this very unique topic. If the man who is responsible for eliminating this from the open Internet is indeed an (ex?-)revisionist (vendetta-pursuer, or whatever the drama is), that's really regretful --- and short-sighted.

[Callafangers]

No one trusted had a full copy of the forum archive (backup)?

No, unfortunately, and given it was all on the server for which the bill went unpaid, it is likely gone for good. That said, you mention you were only able to find some 1% of the forum? This seems to be less than what I would estimate. I am able to find most of the threads I recalled which took place before the archival date, although anything between the first and last 12 pages of much longer threads (>24 pages) appears to be lost.

Did you try both the approach with DocFetcher (after downloading the archive locally to your PC) and also via the archive hosted here?:

https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... codoh.com/

I would recommend locally via DocFetcher as this doesn't rely on Google's search functionality but both have worked reasonably well for me. But yes, in any case, it is unfortunate that many of the posts have been lost.

[Callafangers]

Here are some basic instructions for accessing via DocFetcher:

For those interested, as mentioned elsewhere, a backup as of June 2023 of the [old/defunct] CODOH forum is available here (download and then extract the files into a local folder): http://archive.org/download/codoh-forum ... 6-9-23.rar

To browse the forum pages effectively, you simply need a search indexing tool. One of the easiest ones I have found is DocFetcher, and it is free to download/install, here: https://docfetcher.sourceforge.io/download/

To install it, you may need Java, which takes 1-2 minutes to download and install. Just follow the instructions at the link. Then, download and install DocFetcher (also takes 1-2 minutes).

Once DocFetcher is installed and opened, you're going to right-click on the bottom-left window area that's labeled "Search Scope", then go to "Create Index From > Folder".

Locate and select the folder where you extracted the forum backup .rar to. Then click "Run".

It will take about 5-7 minutes to index the files, so take a break. There may be some errors as it tries to index certain files (e.g. missing photos) but just ignore them.

Once it is done, you will see the activity has fully stopped. At that point, you can click the red X to close the "Run" window. And you are now ready to search!

The search 'rules' work similar to Google. If you simply type a phrase, it will give you all of the files/pages that has any of those words included in the phrase. But if you want to search only for files which have the entire phrase, simply use quotes.

And that's it! Double-click a file to open in your usual browser.

[Archie]

This forum and the old forum are/were both on phpBB forum software. The forum files consist of 1) (most important) an SQL database which stores all posts and user data, and 2) php files which have the general forum software files plus extensions and customizations. All data files for the old forum were sitting on the CODOH.com web server. Everything got deleted in the dispute. CODOH had a backup service but they didn't pay the bill so the service had lapsed.

If someone (and it would have to be someone who had access to the CODOH.com web server) backed up the files at some point and has a local copy, it is possible that a copy of the forum database (probably very old) exists on someone's computer somewhere. If someone finds that and sends it to me (note that this would need to be shared privately and not over the public web as it contains user data), I could host it here on this site as a second backup (to fill in some gaps). But since it's been like two years and no one has come forward, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

[Sannhet]

I haven't yet tried the method of downloading the whole thing yet and the internal searching methods described. (I tried looking through the old forum's main-subforum pages and nothing past page 11 comes up for me.)

Who was running and administering the old forum? Was it Hannover? Did he/they/whoever really not keep full backups that could be fully restored to full functionality, if needed? That is troubling. Maybe comparably troubling to the whole thing being caused by one man's short-sighted vendetta. If others had known how insecure the forum-archive was, people could've helped out just as a few have helped try to pick up the pieces.

From my reading of what you say, Archie, it's possible Michael Santomauro has a copy of the forum archive. It looks like his actions caused the forum to be lost after 21 years consecutive online. It's possible he is still holding it "hostage," still expecting a large payoff from Germar Rudolf for some reasons that didn't make sense when I tried to look into them.

It's troubling to me that Germar himself didn't have a full backup. He often said he "didn't like forums," and it's possible this was a considerable blind-spot in his own thinking (no one can do everything). The forum was a reference-souce comparable to the main CODOH article archives themselves.

[Archie]

I haven't yet tried the method of downloading the whole thing yet and the internal searching methods described. (I tried looking through the old forum's main-subforum pages and nothing past page 11 comes up for me.)

Who was running and administering the old forum? Was it Hannover? Did he/they/whoever really not keep full backups that could be fully restored to full functionality, if needed? That is troubling. Maybe comparably troubling to the whole thing being caused by one man's short-sighted vendetta. If others had known how insecure the forum-archive was, people could've helped out just as a few have helped try to pick up the pieces.

From my reading of what you say, Archie, it's possible Michael Santomauro has a copy of the forum archive. It looks like his actions caused the forum to be lost after 21 years consecutive online. It's possible he is still holding it "hostage," still expecting a large payoff from Germar Rudolf for some reasons that didn't make sense when I tried to look into them.

It's troubling to me that Germar himself didn't have a full backup. He often said he "didn't like forums," and it's possible this was a considerable blind-spot in his own thinking (no one can do everything). The forum was a reference-souce comparable to the main CODOH article archives themselves.

Santomauro would have had control over the hosting account during 2023 and theoretically could have downloaded copies of the forum files, but I think it is exceedingly unlikely that he did so. We had contacted him about the forum a few times while he was in charge, and I don't think he knew much of anything about the forum or tech/admin issues more generally.