Winter of our missed content

[Colibri]

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.

@wolfstu

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 posts
Feb 11, 2002: Late limit of lost posts
On or shortly before Feb 28, 2002: SDMB In Exile established by the grace of Tubadiva et al. Smashie Dynasty begins.
March 10, 2002: Straight Dope Mother Board returns to service. SDMB In Exile is closed, and reopened soon after.
March 20, 2002: SDMB In Exile is closed again.

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” ). The admins had to manually change peoples’ self-customized titles back to ‘Member’; when the board ‘went pay’ in April 2004, these posters found that their titles didn’t automatically upgrade to ‘Charter Member’ when they bought a subscription.
  I’m sure there’s more. It was an interesting and frightening time in SDMB history; for a while, most of us didn’t know what had happened to our beloved Board. In gratitude, I still have the SDMB In Exile bookmarked.