Hi everyone,
Thought this would be a good place to start a thread about the FFG Forum Archive (entropicdreams) (SWRPG community embedded).
The data gathering may be done, but there’s a few things I’d like to do to improve the site itself. I’ll post updates here as I make changes.
For those of you interested, the final stats are: 509 forums with 257,572 topics containing 3,950,111 posts by 65,219 users.
Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions about the archive! 
I just wanted to say - thank you for your amazing work on this project!
Let this become the most liked topic in all of the forum.
A new update for 2021-02-06!
Two more improvements for your viewing pleasure!
Despite it’s short description, there’s actually a lot to the second item. The forum archive originally consisted only of content hosted on the FFG community site (text, emoji, avatars, etc). That’s great, but some of the image threads, like the ship art one, were a bit barren because the original image no longer existed. The Internet Archive had many of those photos, so I extracted them and they’re now visible in the forum archive. Unfortunately, not all of the photos were able to be restored, but 4.5GB worth of them are now available.
One of the ship art pages before (left) and after (right) restoring the images.
This is fantastic news, well done! Is this across the entirety of the forum?
Thanks! Yeah, it’s across the entirety of the forum.
I actually went a little overboard and archived all of the images still available (both original and wayback machine). That ended up being 67GB, so decided to keep it in offline storage and only host the wayback machine images for now.
For those of you who like numbers:
16,234 images were extracted from the Wayback Machine,
143,150 images were archived from their original source, and
31,490 images have been lost to the ravages of time.
So how did you get the ffg forums… from the wayback machine (i don’t think they were backed up untill just before ffg shut down) or directly from ffg?
You may want to set something up so that the wayback machine periodically backs ups these forums.
I actually wrote a script to scrape the forums and store the extracted data in a database, then wrote a small web app to serve the data.
Good idea about the wayback machine. Just checked, and it looks like both these new forums and the archive are stored there.
