Discontinued forum

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Hi.

I was a member and moderator 5+ years for a particular forum. In October the site suddenly ended (was discontinued?), with no notice or warning of any kind to members or staff, and no response to inquiry from forum owner.
The forum had a great amount of important content, and it would be unfortunate if it all were to be lost.
So, my question is this:

Does all of the content of the forum, up until the time it ended, still exist? If so, is there a way to acquire access to, and copy/download it.

Thank You

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Would be impossible to know unless you know or can find out what happened with the servers for that, sorry for your loss.

There may be backups or you can also try a search here to see if there were any external archives made of that site:https://web.archive.org/

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Thanks, that’s what I expected. The loss is unfortunate.
The external archive search is a good thought. I will give that a try.

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Hope you are able to make contact with that forum owner to find out what happened.

There would also be records of e-mails sent out to anyone subscribed to the site when it was still active if members kept those, if you have any way to contact other past members you could ask about that if they wanted to share any e-mail records they may have.

If the domain registration isn’t renewed then you might be able to purchase that and re-launch the site with the same domain! Am not certain how the process works for that, if the owner doesn’t sell the domain but doesn’t renew registration if it goes back to market somehow.

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No email contact for the admin? Perhaps you can get a backup of the forum from the original admin and ask to relaunch the site and run it yourself?

If you don’t have an email for the admin check the about page on the web archive, there’s usually an email in contact us section there.

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@merefield :

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Can you register the domain?

If you can do that you can recreate a Discourse forum there and hope old members will find it and sign up. You could pin a notice.

Before you know it there will be a lot of new content.

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My apologies for the slow reply.

@anon36555649
Yes, I am in contact with several former members, and we are in the process of contacting/re-assembling others from the collective info. we have.

@merefield

Yes, I do have email etc. to contact the forum admin./owner.

That would be the preferable means of salvaging everything (IMO) and a best-case outcome overall.
All of that unfortunately, hinges on whether we can manage to get a reply or honestly just get answers of any kind. (We will of course continue to pursue that avenue, in hopes it can be accomplished somehow, but I’m less than encouraged currently.)

An inquiry was made by another member, at the time the forum ended, and he received a reply from one of the administrator’s staff (A company staff member. Not specifically a forum staff member), stating the site was undergoing maintenance.
Six months has now passed, so I have to believe at this point, that it is obviously not the case.

I’m mindful of trying not to be too lengthy with this post,

(Moderators edit as necessary if you need to. As a long time Mod I understand)

but in adding this I hope even if my situation doesn’t end favorably, it might give others a bit of foresight and a leg up in forming a contingency plan for preventing this from happening to them. (I never saw it coming until it was too late)

This site had (obviously not all active) a little over 5000 total members.
Of that there was the core group of active members including founding members (such as myself) and many early members, who in 5+ years (followed by later active and dedicated contributing members) put in a great deal of work, endless contribution, dedication, pride, and loyalty to the site, its members and our goals.
The result of this was a mass of technical, photographic, historic info. and more, as well as hands on education, expertise, and shared real-world experience from so many people.

The sum of everything as a whole, is truly and genuinely incalculable and irreplaceable, and IMHO impossible to rebuild from scratch even with the most extreme effort.

Thank you for all the current and future help and advice given.
It is greatly, gratefully, and most humbly appreciated by myself, and my fellow forum members.

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