I GOT EM!!
I downloaded all the archived pages from the main known ezboard servers (pub128, pub7, p072, and p098). Oh my gosh I've wanted to do this since I found the link a week before the archive went down again in 2016. I've been waiting for this moment for so long. I'm so glad I was able to take the opportunity.
Thankfully it's all relatively small filesizes, which makes sense considering these are 20-year-old files from when webpages were mostly text and while they still had to take dial-up modem speeds into consideration. The Wayback Machine Downloader did not collect any images that I can tell, but it got all the text and formatting and that's the important part.
This tool is actually quite intuitive to use, thank God. Thank you so much Quillax for the recommendation! And thank your other-forum friend for me as well.
The simplicity of the tool is somewhat offset by the complexity of navigating ezboard's URL system with commands. Fully downloading a single forum requires specifying a download batch on several different parts. I
could download the entirety of pub128.ezboard.com, but I didn't really want to sift through a ton of other random unknown forums.
There's the different number prefixes and types (e.g. pub128.ezboard.com vs p072.ezboard.com), but there's also some variants between the board index page names and subforum names that also have to be collected with separate commands. Even though the subforums have different path names (e.g. pub128.ezboard.com/fpubliccommanderkeenforumtheoriginalcommanderkeenga vs pub128.ezboard.com/fpubliccommanderkeenforumothercommanderkeenstuff) most of them begin with "fpubliccommanderkeenforum" so most of them can be collected together with a wildcard after the common name. The exception is the URL name for Unofficial Keen Games, which is "fpimentogamedevelopment". The index page URL begins with a "b" instead of an "f" ("bpubliccommanderkeenforum").
So this is a lot to keep track of... I've been making a lot of lists. Gratefully this wayback_machine_downloader program has the ability to generate a list of what it would download based on the command you gave it instead of actually downloading it, which was great to test and figure out what it would try to do.
Additionally, after a few early tests, while watching the console as it was running, I noticed it failed to access a file and did not save it. So for my official download run I output the (sometimes very large) console output to a file so I could use a text search to find all the errors and manually download the failed files, and copy the correctly timestamped version into the folder that was left empty by the failure.
The way it sorts the batch downloads is to put each page in a folder named for the timestamp it was archived on. Using the list or the download log makes it very easy to look up a specific page's URL and find it in the collection by referring to the noted timestamp. Using the list is actually even easier than trying to navigate these pages directly on the Wayback Machine, because you can see exactly which files are actually a complete thread to read, instead of just going through clicking things and hoping to find a link that isn't dead (although I'm running into a lot of "deleted" pages now).
This will also be a great asset to the PCKF Archive, because there are many fragments of threads scattered through various alternate ways of accessing the thread. Somehow pages to "reply to a topic" or share it were also archived. I've found pages that contained a single post that looked to be a piece lifted out of a full discussion. If someone were to manually go through the several-dozen-thousand pages, a lot of key discussions could probably be stitched together. This ought to entertain you for a long time, Grandy.
Oh man oh man there is some great stuff in here.
This is the best Christmas present.
I just have a few remaining questions.
Why did the Unofficial Keen Games forum have such a distinct URL? What in the world is Pimento Game Development? Where did the name come from? What's the story behind that?
Are there any more "pub" servers that PCKF was accessed from? Honestly I'm really confused about what the pub/p/b prefix naming system is supposed to tell you and how they're chosen. I might also start a different thread for that because I want details and Google is clueless.
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A dedicated member of the Preservation for Endangered Forums society.