Old website questions and possible recovery

[Dozer]

#43484

Hey guys, fist let me say how heartbroken I was to find out about the crash that lost all those years of forum threads. So much KCW history, not to mention the amazing amount of information in the Tech Questions/Articles section. Having helped John work on that old site WAY back around 2007 – 2008 or so, It just kills me…  makes me feel like crap knowing I never reached back out in later years after someone else was working on it and mentioned having someone setup some automated backups, etc…  Having been a software developer and linux admin for over 20 years means crap if you dont use that knowledge to help out when you can.

So I have spent a few hours over the last few nights (instead of working on my car 😆 ) doing some digging using resources Ive used before in this situation. Im not sure if any of you guys know about this resource or have messed around with it yet, but I was able to dig up quite a bit of the old stuff. It can be a bit finicky because of how the crawler works and creates snapshots of the content based on dates. Images in the posts seem to be hit or miss depending on when it was crawled, as well. It takes quite a bit of playing around with their timestamps to piece things together manually.

Some examples:

I remember reading on the new site that someone was looking for the post that Franz did regarding narrowed beam sizes with tire/rim combos for Type 1’s. So I went digging for that specific post in the old Tech Articles section:  How to choose a narrowed beam for your type one.

Once that worked, I started trying to figure out if the old Build Threads could be found. Heres JJ’s Baja thread. I’ve tried clicking around to see what I could find but it looks like the site was crawled sometime after the crash and its messing up some of the timestamps so they come up blank.

I was also able to get the rotisserie thread and download the video that had Dizzle in it…

Not sure everything would be recoverable but Im trying to work on something that will scan the archive and pull down ALL of the pages/images/videos that are stored in the snapshots. If I can get this to work, I might be able to at least save some of it and make it available as a static archive.

In the meantime, if there are any specific threads you guys can think of that were really helpful/useful, comment on here with as much about the thread as you can remember (thread title, thread name, section, etc). Date info is really helpful too, nothing specific but if you know a topic was posted early like say around 2010, thats a great starting point.  I will try and dig out the specific threads and save them as best I can.

No promises but I’ll keep banging away on this little archiver app as well to see what I can get.

[Rustabus]

#43518

Wow!!! I have zero computer skills but I’m super excited that you do!!! Thanks for digging in and recovering some Awesome KCW history!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

[X2bj]

#43519

Awesome

[Zack]

#43526

This is awesome! I’m amazed that the images and videos have been retained by the Wayback machine…

Russ, if you get a static archive going I would be happy to host it on the server or at least have the link somewhere on the website. I do have a SQL backup of PHPBB post / topic / user data from 2006, which I’m pretty sure was around the time the website got a new design. That backup has the unique ID’s of everything from that time and might be helpful for building an archive – let me know if you want that.

Either way, this gets me thinking about the possible avenues of getting the old posts and images back on the site, so thanks for posting this!

[Pat K]

#43538

Awesome!!

KB‘s barn door build thread, started sometime early 2016, definitely needs to be dug up.

The whole VW world will appreciate this.

Thank you!

We will build it if it comes.

[Critter1]

#43565

Wow, great work Dozer!!
Selfishly I’d like to see if my Notchback build thread can be recovered. Started it around March/April 2015. Thread title probably had my name in it… “Justins 64 Notchback” or something like that.

[Franz]

#43597

Cool. Thank you. Here are the lost build threads I consider the most epic.

Erik’s 58 356 porsche

JJ’s 54 356 porsche

JJ’s 54 23 window deluxe

JJ’s 51 split ragtop

JJ’s 56 oval ragtop

Mark’s 49 beetle

JJ’s 47 beetle

Richard’s 47 beetle

Juan’s 51 split window ragtop.

Howard’s twisted notch

Howard’s volksrod

Creig’s 58 outlaw beetle

Josh’s fridolin

Jay’s 58 ghia

Bryant’s 57 ghia

Kelly’s type 34

KB’s 54 barndoor camping box

Death

 

[THC4ME]

#43600

The list of “most epic builds” listed by Franz above is like a KCW greatest hits album. These are the threads that keep us lurkers up too late staring red eye’d at a computer screen. JJ’s 356 bent window was one of my favorites! Thanks for all your work digging up the lost tapes- I think there are many people who value KCW history.

[Dozer]

#43740

@critter1 I dont see any threads in the snapshots of the completed or current builds even close to “Justins 64 Notchback”. Could it possibly be in another one of the forums?

I’ve been some more time working on my app for pulling this stuff down and have made some progress, but they keep blocking my IP Address for making too many requests for the pages. So Im going to have to try and tweak it to only pull down snaphots of specific threads if I can. I’ll keep plugging away at it.

@franz I will try and find the latest snapshots of those threads you listed and see what I can recover.

[Critter1]

#43741

@dozer it would’ve been in the “Readers Rides” section.

[Dozer]

#43742

Oh ok, was thinking it was one the guys built for you…

I think this may be the one you are looking for? Justin’s 64 Sunroof Notchback

Looks like alot of photobucket watermarked images are showing up in the thread as I randomly clicked on a few pages. Not sure if its all there in this snapshot or not but later tonight after work and spending a few hours on my car, I will see what the latest is I can find. This might be a good thread for me to test the changes to the app I wrote to pull down these pages and archive them as static pages.

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