For the past few days, I have been using an online service to download everything the wayback machine had on CBTricks for the purpose of getting everything forum related into a folder so I could search through it using my computer.
The attached zip folder contains two folders. One titled "forum" and the other titled "forums". These two folders contain everything the wayback machine was able to capture from both the original forum (folder named "forum
s") and the newer simple machines forum (folder named "forum"). There is also a shortcut in the zip that links to the forum main page html inside the "forums" folder used with the original entry point (the one that seemed to have the most working links).
It isn't much, and it is fairly broken, but there are two ways you can go about digging through it.
- You can access the forum web page by clicking the index.html shortcut in the extracted zip folder. Only a limited number of threads will appear under each topic, and those threads usually end one page in. Some wrk better, but most do not. Navigating to Cobra, for example, only has 9 threads accessible this way. Many less than the counter says the forum had.
- You can use your computer to search for specific words in all of the downloaded forum pages. For example, (at least in windows 7) you can use the search feature in the upper right corner and type "content:example" and it will find all html pages that mention "example".
Method 1 offers the highest chance of following a link but does not find everything and will not show anything from a capture date after it.
Method 2 offers the ability to search everything, including what snuck through from the later forum stuff that the crawler was able to grab somehow without logging in, but following the links from a html page you opened manually (in this case) usually brings you right to the index of the root of the drive you saved it to. In other words, most links are dead and you can usually read only what is on that one page.
I was hoping for more, but with the archives crawlers set to only a few links deep and login pages throwing errors, I guess I should be happy to have found his much. Was it worth the $20, probably not, but it is off my mind now. I did try to delete the vast number of "bluehost" and "404" pages, but there is still a little junk in there.
As for other stuff not necessarily forum-related and not in the usual mirrors, I did not find much. A swf file titled bushchampions, a photo of a guy at his drum set, a photo of someones radio setup and HandyAndy's PC-122XL in HD pages.
Links to files that were in the radios section or the like are also dead because this zip only contains the forum folders. We all have that stuff anyway.
I do know a PHP guy, so if anyone hears from Bennie, tell him I'd be willing to see if that "deck of cards" can be reorganized. Short of that, I am giving up on finding anything more. The attachment extracts to about 90MB on disk.