Hi Nth Circle community. The restoration of the old forum posts is now complete! Thanks everyone, for your patience.
Nearly all previous forum content has been restored, although there were a few things I was unable to preserve, like some specific formatting and some embedded quotations.
Most old forum accounts also have been migrated and reinstated in the new forum, with the exception of some accounts that had no activity or were otherwise deleted or abandoned.
You may notice that content has been somewhat reorganized, relying more on "tags" rather than specific categories. This is intentional and is the way the forum will be organized going forward.
If anyone has any questions or notices any problems, please let me know.
There are a couple things to note about how some user accounts were imported. For most of the old forum accounts, they were restored without issue. But in some cases, accounts were either merged or imported as a duplicate account:
1. Email address from old forum matched an email address in the new forum.
This means someone manually recreated their account in the new forum prior to the data restoration. In these cases, the old account was automatically merged into the new forum account. If the username was different between old and new forums, the new name was kept and the old posts were updated to reference the new username.
2. Username from old forum matched a username in the new forum, BUT emails did not match.
In these cases, the assumption is that someone manually recreated their account in the new forum prior to the data restoration, BUT decided to use a different email address. In these cases, the old and new accounts were NOT automatically merged. Instead, the old account was imported into the new forum with a sequence number appended to the username (e.g. username1). For security purposes, these sequenced "duplicate" usernames were set to suspended status, until I can verify ownership. Once I can verify that the old account belongs to the new email address, I will merge the accounts. This is a manual verification process though and will be done on a case by case basis.
If anyone is affected by #2 and wants to request a merge, please direct message me or send a request via the contact page.
Thanks for slogging through it. Pulled up a few old threads that looked fine.
Here's hoping that something you learned during the process has some other beneficial use for you.
Besides personal satisfaction, I doubt I'll ever need to use the little I've learned about Ruby (or its peculiar implementation of regex) from this project. But that's fine. Knowledge for knowledge sake is ok too!
Thanks much for restoring the archives, as there is some priceless technical info therewithin, thanks in particular to the contributions of Chelle, KentE, mmfacemm, Isamorph, Oldbooks1 and JTSR71(+clones).