That left a lot of valuable knowledge (as well as four years of fun) at the mercy of how long Lefora decide to keep it active. Not long, I'd guess.
So I have spend the best part of the last week working on the best way to make as much of the old forum available to us all permanently.
Sadly it isn't possible to simply import all those old threads into the new forum so a different solution is needed.
What I have now done is to design a prototype web page that can be uploaded to Nick's site and accessed from its own menu system.
I've mocked up a sample page here: http://imkickstart.com/link/thread.php
Don't bother clicking the navigation links yet because they are not active (although the resources ones are). They are just there for you to see how things might work.
Alongside designing this I have gone through every thread on the 1-75 part of the forum and put the model number referred to at the beginning of its title - so that we can see all the threads on a particular model together.
In so doing I have thinned out the number of threads from over 1500 to about 1000 by removing those that were in the wrong category (lots of those), were just reports of Toyfairs, had no replies or had no real 1-75 content.
Because the way Lefora stored pictures was (and seems to still be) rather bizarre, any that were uploaded to threads are no longer accessible, which is a huge shame. Many threads make little sense without their pictures, but mostly I have left them in because the following discussion was of interest. Where threads simply mean nothing without the pictures I have reluctantly removed them.
In all this I have not tried to edit or censor - just to end up with a more manageable and usable archive.
Comments and thoughts on the design of the page are welcome because once I commit to making the 1000 or so pages based on this template there will be no going back!
Martin
P.S. You can see which forum categories I managed to save in the top menu. I'll get to those ones later!
