All posts from 2005 to 2008 back online!

[DJ Omnimaga]

A large part of Omnimaga history that was gone for over 4 years now has come back to life. Yesterday, it has come to our attention that the previous Omnimaga forums that we used from 2005 to 2007, along with the temporary forums used in early 2008 before Omnimaga's 6 months dormancy, were back online. The discovery was made after Jonius7 was searching Google and stumbled upon one of the revived boards. They were only restored by Invisionfree recently, because I checked a month ago and they were still gone.

In other words it will only have taken 4 years before the Invisionfree team finally process the board restoration request. However, since the deletion of an Invisionfree board automatically backs up its entire content prior being processed, this means that every single post, member account (except prior April 9th 2006), avatar, file attachment and private message that were still available until the very end of each site remained intact. An extra sub-forum on the Invisionfree site was added to redirect to the temporary board, though, for ease of access, and both places are now in read-only mode (although it is still possible to login, for those who still remember their password).

So today, you can once again access the entire forum content of the previous website where Omnimaga was located from May 2005 to December 31st 2007 below:
http://z9.invisionfree.com/omnimaga/

And obviously, the Omnimaga temporary board used afterward until March 3rd 2008:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/omnimaga/index/

And here is a list of every forum attachments ever uploaded from May 2005 to March 2008. Note that all files that are not images were renamed by IPB software, so for example, THEGAME.8xp became p11563638.ibf. Simply change the name after downloading it from the list:
http://djomni.57o9.org/oldomnifiles/

In 2008, the original plan was to merge the content of those boards with this one if they ever returned online, to keep all of Omnimaga history in one place. Members' post counts were going to be merged as well. However I am no longer admin and writing the script to perform the post merging task would be an incredible task, so in short terms, the content of those sites will remain as they currently are or possibly converted to standalone SMF format.

For those who are nostalgic, remember that you can still access the even older Omnimaga site that used (poorly-coded) static pages too, along with its minor theme redesigns.

[annoyingcalc]

[Netham45]

Haha, they finally brought it back online? We applied for our sites to be restored from backup what, 4 years ago? (Maybe I should have read all the news article. `-`)

[Radical Pi]

Wow, I never expected this to happen. This is pretty cool
I guess today I'll be nostalgia-binging through the old archives

[Art_of_camelot]

I was quite shocked to find out that these *finally* got restored. Pretty cool!

[yunhua98]

wow, this is great.  You you think the posts can be integrated into the new forum?

[Juju]

Probably. If we figure out how. Although there's a link to those forums everywhere in this forum.

Anyway that's pretty nice. And that was damn long.

[DJ Omnimaga]

The trick to include all posts would be to:

1) Manually update each remaining user post counts to merge their original account one with their current ones. Update their account with their old join date.

2) Purchase the databases from Invisionfree or use a screenscrapping script to extract the posts from the boards. Note: I was planning to pay since the beginning, assuming the restoration was not expensive (finally the latter was free). The former gives us an InvisionBoard 1.3.1 database and the latter gives us an SMF or PHPBB board (although if Jimbauwens uses his script, then we just get HTML static pages). NOTE: There are no conversion purchase for Zetaboards, so for that a screenscrapping script would be needed.

3) Convert the boards to SMF, then upgrade to SMF 1.1.16, if either are needed.

4) To save work, empty the PM, members and attachments tables if needed. Basically get rid of every account on the 3 databases.

5) Install every Omnimaga mods on the other SMF boards, so when importing the posts after doing number #5, no error about mismatching amount of columns or something occur (for example, the post rating system adds extra rows to the messages table).

6) Turn current board offline and do a backup

7) Run an MySQL query through database 1 (z7.invisionfree.com/Omnimaga) to increment post IDs by 300000, topic IDs by 30000 and so on. Do the same with database 2 (z9.invisionfree), but with 350000 and 35000 respectively. Same for database 3 (the Zetaboards), with 400000 and 40000 and finally the current database, with 500000 and 50000. This will ensure no post ID overlaps or something.

Now all links pointing to specific threads or posts on the current board are broken. What to do? Put in some server script, .htaccess or DNS setting (not sure what it would have to be) that will cause people to be redirected to higher post IDs whenever they click or type a link to an original post ID. So for example, http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=12513.msg228863#msg228863 would automatically redirect to http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=62513.msg728863#msg728863 . For the Invisionfree links, we don't really care since it's old.

9) Import the older data in the current board database.

10) The main issue here is to not forget to increment a single member ID. For example if you ever forget on one database to increment board categories, then they won't be imported or they will overwrite

11) Now you got a shitload of extra board sub-forums! Simply move their respective content (I could do that) to the current board ones (for example, News topic from the 2006-07 sub-forum to news) then get rid of duplicate categories. For the 2005-06 database, there is only one category, so just leave that category intact while I myself move the old topics back to their respective sections (as news editor I can help moving topics).

12) Edit the topic start dates of the old 2004-05 news articles to the original ones at http://www.omnimaga.org/oldsite/index_v3.html

12) Fix possible messed up post counts

In  other words, yes there is a bunch of work to do, especially considering our installed board mods installed extra SQL fields to our tables.

[yunhua98]

The discovery was made after Jonius7 was searching Google and stumbled upon one of the revived boards. They were only restored by Invisionfree recently, because I checked a month ago and they were still gone.

Just want to point out a mistake.  HOMER-16 found it, not Jonius. 
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=12495.msg228519#msg228519

[apcalc]

Great news!  Nice to see this info back!

[Scipi]

The discovery was made after Jonius7 was searching Google and stumbled upon one of the revived boards. They were only restored by Invisionfree recently, because I checked a month ago and they were still gone.

Just want to point out a mistake.  HOMER-16 found it, not Jonius. 
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=12495.msg228519#msg228519

Technically, DJ_O actually found it from my search results of his hotmail email account.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Oh wait right, HOMER-16, not Jonius.

Also from the 2008 site I still have the spam from the anon raid and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else still had theirs archived too. I still also got 5 of the anon posts located in the spam section (there were over 50, but I deleted most back then)



(Also that board system was so hard to edit, CSS-wise. X.x)

EDIT the remaining spam topics http://s1.zetaboards.com/omnimaga/forum/64561/

[Deep Thought]

If all that could be added into the current Omnimaga site, that would add three years in posts

[DJ Omnimaga]

Indeed and it would be easier to access. Also it would be nice to be able to search through those posts, since the Invisionfree search engine has been disabled since 2002.

[Deep Thought]

lol I wonder how many posts you'd have with those.

EDIT: 43,706 ... enough for over 9000x4