Winter of our missed content

Do we know what we lost, if not the actual contents? An archive of the post titles maybe?

My understanding is that all posts from that time period were entirely lost.

I’ve heard the references to this period before but what actual year did this occur?

We don’t know, because it was all lost.

December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day), 2001 to some time in early March 2002.

The event received its name here.

I think December of 2001 until April of 2002.

nothing of value was lost.

The board came back up on March 10, 2002.

December 7, 2001 to March 10, 2002. A daterange search on Google- site:boards.straightdope.com daterange:2452251-2452344 returns eight results. Oddly enough, two of those are listed within the lost period but in fact their months and dates were reversed. In board thread numbers, the last old one was t=103054 and the first new one t=103056 (55 yields no result).

Let’s see, I know I started several threads:

A Plan for a Just and Lasting Middle East Peace That All Sides Will Immediately Accept
Cold Fusion: Here’s How To Do It For Real
A Truly Marvellous Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem

(That last one was kind of a departure for me, as I’m not usually a math guy; I think the OP for that one came to me in a dream.)

Ah, well. I can remember the titles, but I couldn’t possibly reconstruct the actual content.

All those posts…lost…like tears in rain.

The Dark Pages

A pity; I was kinda hoping that on some old 3 1/2" diskette somewhere the board administrators might have something like a copy of an old Archive page which might at least give us a tantalizing glimpse.

Don’t rule that out. Just saying…

How did people know it was back? Was there a mass e-mail to registered users?

It was never down. During that time period, people were posting and reading as normal, oblivious to the impending disaster. And then all of those posts disappeared.

And there wasn’t any on-site archive, but a lot of it ended up archived by other archive sites.

I was thinking in particular of a thread I’m certain I started about the song “The Night Chicago Died”. I’d asked about the song’s strange take on history and we had fun excoriating the song’s inaccuracies. I remember one comment that the “east side of Chicago” would be somewhere in Lake Michigan.

I believe the board actually went down for several weeks in February and early March, and a temporary board was established. However, once it came back up posts that had been made on the regular board as far back as December 7 were lost.

Based on the people doing “First Thread” type posts, I have to believe it was actually down for some unspecified, non-trivial length of time.

A temporary board makes sense.

This post from 2005 gives a history of what happened. The crash occurred about February 10 or 11, 2002, but posts as far back as December 7 were lost.

So from December 7, 2001 to February 11, 2002, posts were made on the board but lost.

From February 11 to March 10, 2002, the board was down and no posts were made. For part of that time a temporary board was in use.

I lost my famous “Qadgop is going to prison” thread in that disastrous board crash!