Fate of the MSPA Forums

someone mentione dme a year ago in this thread im not dead yet im chesse20 most of the time now

So where is our old pal Philip with his comforting lies?

So, say I wanted to archive what I could of a specific RP thread in a google doc. I've done what I could (copypasting the first 3 pages from the thread's title at the time of its closure), but if I changed the URL that I'm searching to what the thread was called at different points, would I be able to get different results? And if yes, what was the forum's system of url-writing?

web.archive.org/web/20130926181809/http://mspaforums.com/showthread.php?54178-Super-High-School-Level-Dangan-Ronpa-Roleplay-%28THREAD-1-COMPLETE%29/page2

This is the archive of the thread from when it had the title "Super High School Level Dangan Ronpa Roleplay (THREAD 1 COMPLETE)" at the end of the thread. But if, for example, I were to change "THREAD ONE COMPLETE" to "Prologue: accepting submissions," would I be able to potentially see results from that time period? And if so, how would I format that in the URL bar?

I've pinged WP a couple times since my internship ended, and each time the response is basically that they're not ready yet but will be soon. I'm almost certain it's only going to be a priority after Hiveswap part 1 launches. I'm not really affiliated with the company anymore, but I'll finish the job here once they're ready.

Tragic.

What I find odd is that it's been well over a year since the Hackening, and yet the old forums' web server is still up and running. When will the lease on the hardware run out? Or is it on automatic payment and WP is so focused on other things they haven't even noticed they're still paying for a website that doesn't exist?

Looking at the Glowhost site(whom the forums were hosted with) it looks like you can pay for, at most, 2 years at a time. So if the site is still up by april next year, then we have our answer.
Also, it look like most of Glowhost's plans plans come with automatic, regular backup features, so there's hope that the data still is recoverable.

Well a straight restore wouldn't be much help because whatever security weakness the hacker script kiddie used would still be there and the site would still be at risk. Either that or the claims of "WP has done nothing" are disappointingly literal and they can't even find the spare 15 seconds to click the restore button.

My knowledge of code and programming and databases is super limited, but if I recall the issue is basically that all the virusy/compromised/whatever code was still there, so a reset of the contents of the forum would have still been Bad. Plus they really did want to make a shiny new replacement forum, which as discussed was pretty close to complete and just waiting for approval and server type stuff on WP's end.

A backup does exist I think, but in a form that made it tricky to extract the data in a practical way? There were safety/security concerns there, too. I realize that's not particularly helpful, but it's been like a year since all of this discussion was going on and I only kind of understood it at the time so the details are foggy.

But yeah. Moral of the story is that probably nothing is going to happen until Hiveswap gets released, and then MAYBE things will happen once some people's hands are freed? It's not ideal, but what can ya do.

Extracting as in taking the physical files out is easy sure. But the data would almost certainly need to be sanitized for public viewing first; cutting out all the users' IP addresses for instance. You'd need to assign people who are familiar enough with the site's database to know what needs to be modified/cut out, and also can write the scripts for the database to carry that out. From there the process may take some time, depending on how long it takes to process the millions of posts. With all of that effort, you might as well just convert it to the new site's format instead.

Is it a good time to roll our eyes about how their game is out and there's still no forum to discuss it on

In principle that should work, but this isn't exactly the most typical of cases.
One the one hand, it seems that WP is basically ready to relaunch the forums at the press of the button, but aren't for some unknown reason. Perhaps they believe the forums aren't worth the cost, in which case, dropping the fandom activity would worsen the situation.
And on the other hand, since WP has had seemingly no contact with the fandom at all for years, would they even notice if the fandom's activity started dropping?

Worst case scenario, the only contact WP has with the fans is the sales figures of Hiveswap and the merch, and convincing people to not buy those things on the grounds that there's one less discussion platform is no easy task.

Slightly-less-worse case scenario, the reviews for Hiveswap are also being monitored, so flooding them with mentions of the forum issue might, at the very least, get through to them. But like I said, making them aware of the issue isn't actually the problem here, it's getting them to act, or at the very least respond.