Lumpy
August 2, 2015, 1:25pm
1
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.
pool
August 2, 2015, 4:09pm
3
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.
zuma
August 2, 2015, 5:02pm
7
nothing of value was lost.
The board came back up on March 10, 2002.
Lumpy
August 2, 2015, 5:14pm
9
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.
Lumpy
August 2, 2015, 5:22pm
12
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.
Lumpy
August 2, 2015, 6:38pm
16
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.
Chronos:
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.
Colibri:
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.
Actually, I rememberd it as a lot more than 2-3 weeks. If I recally correctly, the latest posts that weren’t lost to the crash were from about Dec 7 2001, and the crash occurred in mid-February. If memory serves, the SDMB In Exile was a couple weeks in coming; a brief review of the archive linked above showed that board was in place by Feb 28. It continued for the rest of the month or so that the Motherboard was down; the two boards subsequently coexisted for a short time (two weeks or so, as I recall).
Further archaeological evidence (no, I didn’t use the search feature to get these):
This thread appears to be from very shortly after the Motherboard returned to service:Reopened Bbboy forum - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
Corroboration for the dates of the Lost Content:Where have all the pre-12/7/01 threads gone? - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
The gap in the posts can be seen (right now) on page 68 of ATMB. The last post in each thread goes from 12-07-2001 to 03-10-2002.
So, the chronology as I can reconstruct it:
Dec 7, 2001: Early limit of lost postsTubadiva et al . Smashie Dynasty begins.
Other trivia about the Temp Board for the intersted:
The original colours were a wierd brownish-mustard colour, later amended to a more familiar grey.
A number of surprising coding tags existed on the Temp Board, including [Whoview], which, when the post was viewed, replaced itself by the username of the poster viewing it. This caused so much confusion that it was disused… but they had to go about it the back way. They added “Whoview” to the Temp Board software’s list of profanities, so that it would be automatically replaced by “Whov!ew”. This disabled the feature.
Another tag got a similar treatment, being substituted by the string “AnnoyingTag”. I don’t remember what that tag did, though.
In addition to Smashie, there was a smiley for ROTFLMAO, which was a grinning smileyface that rolled back and forth across the screen.
When the Motherboard returned, a new version of the vBulletin software was introduced. The various non-default settings that the SDMB had previously operated with weren’t carried over, so when the Teeming Millions flooded back onto the boards, things looked a little different. One of the unexpected capabilities users had was to edit the title under their name - the one that said “Member” (nowadays it says “Charter Member” or “Guest”). The admins specifically requested people not do this, and then they turned that feature off (so I never go to change mine to “Prefect Meister” bookmarked .
I lost my famous “Qadgop is going to prison” thread in that disastrous board crash!