First of all, a huge thanks to Callafangers, without whose foresight and initiative we would have far less preserved of the old forum than we do.
Coverage and Limitations
The old forum had posts going back to Nov 2002 up until early January 2024, approximately 100,000 posts. The backup is from June 9, 2023, so anything from the last seven months is definitely not included. If anyone recalls some of the more important discussions from that missing period, let's try to recreate/repost these in whatever form possible here on the new forum.
The backup hosted here consists of static HTML pages. The good news is that this does preserve the look and feel of the original pages really well. However there are some known issues and limitations.
- For anything with a high page count, the browser typically can find the first dozen or so pages and the last dozen or so but for the middle pages it often gives a 404 Not Found error. In some cases, these pages, though not accessible via the normal pages, might still be accessible via a search tool (see the tips section). (As an example, the thread "BA's case for orthodoxy" is quite long at 34 pages. If you click through each page, you will get Not Found errors on many of the interior pages. However I was able to find some of these using DocFetcher.)
- The pages are for viewing only. None of the interactive or query-based functions will work, i.e., you can't log in, post replies, and so forth. Most importantly, the native forum search function does not work (see tips for workarounds).
- Many of the links to external sites and links to internal threads do seem to work, but some things like attachments will not work.
We have added a Google search bar to main page of the mirror site to replace forum search function. The results seem to be improving as more of the pages get indexed. We will see how well this ends up working.
If you wish to dig deep, you may wish to download the backup to your local machine.
https://archive.org/details/codoh-forum-backup-6-9-23
Once you have unzipped the rar file, go to CODOH Forum Backup 6-9-23\FORUM CODOH 23 and click on the index.html file. This should display the backup site in your browser (just like what is hosted here).
To search pages on your local machine, one option is to use an indexing program like DocFetcher. This is a free program. Run it on the forum backup. It will take several minutes to index the pages. Once it is done you can enter keywords in the search bar at the top and get fast results.
It also might be possible to write some sort of script to scrape data from the pages, if anyone wants to give that a try.
From what I have seen thus far, it seems some pages are missing, but it's not clear at this point how large the gaps are.
Please feel to add any tips you find useful for accessing the post archive.