The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

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The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Quillax »

Hey, guys! Some of you might remember that before late 2007, this community was on ezboard. In May 2005, many threads had been deleted thanks to some naughty hack done to ezboard. The PCKF Archive was made to preserve what had been lost. The Wayback Machine also preserved the old PCKF ezboard, but for a long time it wouldn't allow us to view the forum for whatever reason. However, I checked in pretty recently, and...

The ezboards are viewable again on the Wayback Machine!!! :D :D :D

Seriously, take a look!

Aug. 25, 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020825090 ... rkeenforum
Dec. 15, 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20071215023 ... rkeenforum

Isn't this so awesome!? Imagine how much they have that the PCKF Archive hasn't archived yet! (I think I found at least one.)

Speaking of the PCKF Archive, I'm going to ping its webmaster Grandy02; I'm sure he'll love to hear about this!
Grandy02 wrote:
EDIT: Just sent Grandy02 a PM. Hopefully, he'll notice it!
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by proYorp »

OH MY GOSH :O

Somebody download all of this before it goes offline again! That happened like, twice before or something!
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Roobar »

Ah! The good old times! I was known as Iv4n or wiivn. Yeah
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Pandakeen »

This is, as 2002 forumgoers say, t3h l33tz!
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Benvolio »

The links are giving me "this site can't be reached" this morning. I hope someone grabbed as much material as they could when the chance was there.

It would be cool if these old chats could somehow be ported onto the current pckf site so they could be browsed through the modern interface.
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by proYorp »

Still working for me.

Please does anyone know how one would go about downloading the latest versions of all the pages? Would we have to use our own web-crawler to (politely) scan the archives? I have no idea how to do such a thing. Does Wayback have an easy option to save a page you're viewing?

I haven't even had much time to look at this yet. It's so weird though because literally last week I was just thinking "man, it would've been cool to see how the forum was evolving in like 2002, too bad that's gone."



Also! I went and checked that other rare link I always think of whenever this comes up and it's working too! (pub7 ezboard)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pub ... rkeenforum
It redirects to here (p072):
https://web.archive.org/web/20040722090 ... rkeenforum
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Quillax »

proYorp wrote: Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:25 Please does anyone know how one would go about downloading the latest versions of all the pages? Would we have to use our own web-crawler to (politely) scan the archives? I have no idea how to do such a thing. Does Wayback have an easy option to save a page you're viewing?
In another forum I'm part of, someone has suggested looking at an article from Archiveteam for info and tools for downloading stuff from the Wayback Machine, although I haven't tried any of the tools yet. He particularly recommended the Wayback Machine Downloader, which requires Ruby.
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by proYorp »

Thinking about this more... For an automatic download to be complete it'd have to get everything, from every time saved, not just the latest. For one thing, a lot of the latest are after the forum hack and broken anyway, and for another, the "time saved" affects the index pages and the links that will be found there. For instance, Page 4 of a subforum from 2002 and Page 5 from 2004 are going to be wildly incongruent, not a linear timeline. We should talk about combing through and finding the most complete latest after it's all safe.

I see in that Ruby program's github manual "--all-timestamps" is a parameter. I wonder how much hard drive space that'll be, and if it gets related images and stuff. And if it'll save the same image 50,000 times. And if it automatically goes through all the sub-pages?

I'll have to figure out how to set up Ruby, but does anyone else already have it working and can test this program at all?
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by proYorp »

I guess I found one thing the PCKF Archive is missing, direct confirmation that the author of the thread called "...Test your keen skillZ..." was in fact Eazyjay. The first page of the thread is still not available here, but the author is visible from the index page, though it doesn't show the date started:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031129073 ... ent?page=2

It does seem like the indexes will be important to preserve, because in some cases the only remnant of a thread is its title. I did download this particular page manually...

Currently looking into pros/cons of installing Ruby via apt vs snap.
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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by proYorp »

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. :D 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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Re: The PCKF ezboard is back on the Wayback Machine!

Post by Grandy02 »

I noticed this before reading it here. Once within two months or so, I checked whether ezboard was still blocked. And surprisingly, the olde PCKF instead of the "Sorry." message popped up the last time I tried. Nonetheless, thanks to Quillax for notifying me. :)

Yeah, it's awesome to be able to access all those files again. Yesterday, I updated some of the PCKF Archive's existing pages with the posts I missed to save the last time, more to come. It was already difficult to find additional interesting topics among my saved files, now I'll have enough material for a while.

Interestingly, ezboard.com as a whole got unblocked. In the 2010s, the pages were only accessible due to a "gap" in the Wayback Machine - ezboard was blocked the whole time, but subdomains like pub128 were not always affected. So the current owner of the ezboard domain actually allowed the Internet Archive to lift the block.

@proYorp: Great what you've done, it's good to know that nothing will be lost even if the block is reinstated for whatever reason. :)
proYorp wrote: Sun Dec 18, 2022 11:25 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?
Pimento, a.k.a. Orb, The Soggy Mop, and hinkle0, was among the creators of early Keen fangames. He also set up the board on ezboard. More can be read in the thread "how did the keen community begin?". Also, from another thread:
Flaose wrote: No, TSM and TMST are completely different people. Ever notice that the Unofficial Keen Games address is pub128.ezboard.com/fpimentogamedevelopment? Guess who Pimento is...
Xtraverse wrote:I've never understood why the forum was named after him...something to do with taking over the board? Whatever, that's long forgotten anyways, no point bringing it up.
hinkle0 wrote: My name is still in there? Gee. I don't even remember why it's there. Sadly, Xtraverse is probably right.

What surprises me is that the colors here have been the same for so long... Since less than a month after this PCKF's establishment, I believe. And no one has changed the obviously amateurish graphics... That surprises me more than anything. I look at them and think "How can I have ever thought I was good at making graphics?" Whatever. They accomplish their purpose.
So he was also responsible for the earliest available PCKF logo and buttons.
proYorp wrote: Sun Dec 18, 2022 11:25 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.
I'm not aware of any more, and don't expect any other ones to exist. Except for "b7", but there is virtually nothing archived. Before "pub", they used "server" (e.g. server3.ezboard.com), but that seems to predate the PCKF.
PCKF Archive - The Keen Community's Past (and Present) | grandy02.shikadi.net
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