Acquiring backed up forum data.

[Dan's Friend]

Forum URL: sirdanielfortesque.proboards.com/

Hello,

I'm a moderator on the MediEvil forum. Recently our forum was completely decimated due to some petty drama involving a moderator banning mostly all other moderators, who also then ended up giving admin privileges to a completely new account posing as one of the banned moderators (posing as me actually). Of course the new account ended up being a troll who proceeded to erase completely everything. We've since managed to recover control over the forum using a moderator account that was seemingly left unbanned by the rogue moderator, probably by mistake. However, all of our content is still lost.

I understand that ProBoards doesn't offer restoring forums to their previous state as a service, however it would be great if we could at least get the backed up data itself (just the public and members only threads of course, no interest in DMs). It's some eleven years worth of content that's been lost and it is very upsetting to everyone in our community. 

Thank you.

[Michael]

Hi,

Unfortunately we cannot do anything to help. I am truly sorry that this unfortunate incident occurred with your forum.

[Dan's Friend]

Sorry if I come across as rude, but I am still very upset about what happened and I had some more questions about this.

Would you be able to clarify why you cannot help? I've found an older thread that suggests this was previously a service that was offered (here). Why was it discontinued?

I also understand that you back things up regularly in case of server failures and it is thus not impossible for you to restore this content, or am I wrong in that regard?

[Michael]

Hi,

We (many years ago now) did offer content restoration for a fee.

We no longer offer content restoration due to changes in our systems and in privacy law. Unfortunately this is not something that can be changed.

Forum backups are performed regularly, but that system is completely separate and is not designed to accommodate individual restorations.

[Dan's Friend]

Ok, thank you. Admittedly it is quite frustrating to imagine that all the data still exists but that it will never see the light of day again... But that is my (and my community's) frustration to deal with I suppose.

[bigballofyarn]

I'm so sorry this happened to you. The sad reality is that you can't always trust the people you want to trust. My boyfriend and closest friends are moderators on my forum, but they can't do anything that I can't reverse in the event that they make a mistake. I know that this advice doesn't help remedy what already happened, but perhaps in the future, you should keep some powers solely for yourself. Best of luck. I know you will be able to rebuild your forum!

[Dan's Friend]

Jul 10, 2020 10:38:35 GMT -8 bigballofyarn said:

I'm so sorry this happened to you. The sad reality is that you can't always trust the people you want to trust. My boyfriend and closest friends are moderators on my forum, but they can't do anything that I can't reverse in the event that they make a mistake. I know that this advice doesn't help remedy what already happened, but perhaps in the future, you should keep some powers solely for yourself. Best of luck. I know you will be able to rebuild your forum!

Thank you.

Sadly most of us have moved on from the forum to Discord servers some years ago, but it was an invaluable information and download archive for the community since then (we had interviews with some of the game's developers on there and other stuff like that - would get lost in a fast-paced Discord server though). I don't know if there's any point in rebuilding given the low activity levels we've had since we moved to Discord but we might try to restore some of the content from local back-ups and Archive.org anyway. Cheers.

[bigballofyarn]

Jul 10, 2020 10:50:46 GMT -8 Dan's Friend said:

Jul 10, 2020 10:38:35 GMT -8 bigballofyarn said:

I'm so sorry this happened to you. The sad reality is that you can't always trust the people you want to trust. My boyfriend and closest friends are moderators on my forum, but they can't do anything that I can't reverse in the event that they make a mistake. I know that this advice doesn't help remedy what already happened, but perhaps in the future, you should keep some powers solely for yourself. Best of luck. I know you will be able to rebuild your forum!

Thank you.

Sadly most of us have moved on from the forum to Discord servers some years ago, but it was an invaluable information and download archive for the community since then (we had interviews with some of the game's developers on there and other stuff like that - would get lost in a fast-paced Discord server though). I don't know if there's any point in rebuilding given the low activity levels we've had since we moved to Discord but we might try to restore some of the content from local back-ups and Archive.org anyway. Cheers.

That's definitely up to you.  Perhaps a new forum is what you need to get things going again, but with a fresh start. Best of luck in whichever route you pursue.

[Dan's Friend]

Just wanted to add a final bit here in case anyone goes through the same ordeal and needs a way to back up their recently lost forum data:

If parts of your forum were publicly accessible, then they were likely crawled by Google and will be available in Google's Cache. We've successfully recovered a pretty big chunk of our old threads this way. Nothing that required logging in of course, but it's certainly better than nothing!

Anyway, hope this can help someone. Cheers.

EDIT: Other search engines keep caches as well so it's worth checking those too. Found some stuff Yahoo caught that Google didn't for example.

[Kami]

Jul 11, 2020 16:03:43 GMT -8 Dan's Friend said:

Just wanted to add a final bit here in case anyone goes through the same ordeal and needs a way to back up their recently lost forum data:

If parts of your forum were publicly accessible, then they were likely crawled by Google and will be available in Google's Cache. We've successfully recovered a pretty big chunk of our old threads this way. Nothing that required logging in of course, but it's certainly better than nothing!

Anyway, hope this can help someone. Cheers.

Archive.org may also be helpful (the Wayback Machine portion) -- they keep archived data for longer than Google (: Looks like they have content going back to 2011. It's not perfect though, in some cases it may have archived only the home page.

web.archive.org/web/*/sirdanielfortesque.proboards.com/