Save City of Heroes' Forums! Archive Project

(I really should have posted this sooner!)

Titan Network's been leading the charge in saving the game and studio we love from oblivion. While TonyV coordinates all our efforts, Guy Perfect's Sentinel Plus has given us the ability to archive our characters so that we may, at the very least, have a copy of all that we have done with them during the game's run.

... but what about the forums?

Even if we do save the game and Paragon Studios stays together to continue development, we'll likely lose the City of Heroes Forums. We have eight years of community culture and history here, and I know I'm not the only one who doesn't want to see it all vanish like a popped soap bubble.

Back around September 2 or 3, a few days after the NCSoft's announcement, I put in a call for help—and it's been answered. Jason Scott's Archive Team is riding to our rescue!

What's the Archive Team Doing?

As of this post, they've focused their efforts on these:

• Saving Forum Topics by ID. They're working from the earliest thread in the boards on up to the most recent.
• Announcements and Forum Display pages. Stuff from index.php and forumdisplay.php.
• They are also looking into archiving the main site, and possibly the fan sites listed here, but as of yet I don't have confirmation on what they're doing there.

You can monitor the status of the archiving project here.

What Can I Do to Help?

The Archive Team has plenty of people on hand to work on grabbing data, and they don't want to accidentally DDoS the servers with too many archivers on the job. However, if there's anything you think they ought to save from the City of Heroes website or forums, respond here and I'll inform them.

Again, keep in mind that they are saving pages, not the actual forum software or its database. If and when these forums go down, the archive will just be that: an archive of saved web pages, not a backup forum you can continue posting on. That also means the archives will only be as functional as the thoroughness of their archiving. When suggesting things for them to back up, think in terms of URLs. If you know of something specific they ought to archive, reply with their URLs here. If it's a specific thing (like a feature of the board, e.g. links to individual posts, member profiles, VCards, etc.), give an example URL so I know what to show them.

Can the Archive Team Update Their Archive?

When I asked about it, one of the Archive Team guys said there's no reason they can't re-run the process to catch updated or new threads. So hopefully, if the forums survive the whole way to November 30, they'll have no trouble updating their archives to reflect the state of the forums at that time.

Where Will the Archives be Accessible?

The raw files will be uploaded as archives over at the Internet Archive, so Titan Network or another benefactor could probably grab them and host them when all is said and done. One Archive Team member mentioned that the long-term plan is to get the data from their archiving projects integrated into the Wayback Machine, but that's not something that's been done with any of their projects as of yet.

I'll be updating this as new information comes in!

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