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In addition to the general sadness of losing our history, another sad thing is that I wasn't able to use the search function due to not being able to log in, but had been under the impression that it'd be fixed at some point and I could carry out proper examinations of the past. But I guess at this point that will never happen.

 

The long downtime, the serials being abandoned, the official sites closing, now this...despite all the hard work of the staff and members, Bionicle's online presence only ever seems to be declining. What future do we have at this point?

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It is something of a shame to see everything from those years go away, but I am sure it is for the best.

 

Wayback Machine does seem to have many, if not all, of the pages archived on their site. It will be a little trickier navigating there, though, as you cannot run a search to find something specific.

believe victims. its actually not that hard, and youd look kind of bad if you were to, say, side with an abuser because theyre your friend

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Well I'm both glad and depressed that I chose today to pop back in. How do I search the archives for my old posts? I can't log in for some reason.

In addition to the general sadness of losing our history, another sad thing is that I wasn't able to use the search function due to not being able to log in, but had been under the impression that it'd be fixed at some point and I could carry out proper examinations of the past. But I guess at this point that will never happen.

If you changed your password on the new forums, it won't work on the archive but you'll have to use the password you had before the downtime.Although I only rarely visited the archives, this is very sad news. :( Though it appears not all content is lost, so it's kind of a pity that's going to disappear as well.-Gata signoff.png

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It is something of a shame to see everything from those years go away, but I am sure it is for the best.

 

Wayback Machine does seem to have many, if not all, of the pages archived on their site. It will be a little trickier navigating there, though, as you cannot run a search to find something specific.

 

I found the Wayback Machine to be of little help, although I suppose I could try it again.

 

I can log in to the archives currently.

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Well, I wasn't around much for most of the Archive years, so it's not too sad, but I did enjoy reading theories and looking at MOCs. However, I am happy my noobish times are going. I am sad that the Dino Attack RPG 1.0 is going, though. Hey, if any staff read this, is it possible to fix the DARPG so we can get a copy of it?

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I found the Wayback Machine to be of little help, although I suppose I could try it again.

 

I can log in to the archives currently.

 

Looking more closely, I see that it definitely doesn't have everything, and the only way to access a topic is to go to a date near its original posting and hope it is on the first few pages of topics. Definitely not ideal, but at least it is something. :shrugs:

 

EDIT: ...and suddenly I am running into several topics that haven't been archived among those linked to on the archived forums. I guess it is more randomized than I had thought.

Edited by Tazakk

believe victims. its actually not that hard, and youd look kind of bad if you were to, say, side with an abuser because theyre your friend

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I'm pretty sure the web archive only keeps the front page, and maybe occasionally threads that had lots of activity. Still, the official archives have everything up through Nov. '03. ( I wonder why some beef would start deleting right at December 2003?)

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How to Follow BIONICLE

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I'm pretty sure the web archive only keeps the front page, and maybe occasionally threads that had lots of activity. Still, the official archives have everything up through Nov. '03. ( I wonder why some beef would start deleting right at December 2003?)

I believe that's not how it works. Rather, all database tables except the one/s including content from before 2004 were deleted, probably without explicit knowledge of which table contained which ones. Though you never know.-Gata signoff.png Edited by Gatanui

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B-b-but my childhood. All my hopes and dreams (and promotion topics) were there.

 

And I was coming here today to specifically look up something there. How odd to learn of this on the same day.

 

Someone did mention Wayback, which I was going to suggest as well. I don't know how useful it will be, but it is better than nothing.

 

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I'm open to solutions of any kind, as I know that few people want to download those huge files.

They don't seem that huge to me from when I downloaded them before, honestly.

 

My only suggestions are:

 

1) Renaming them with the year of the beginning (as I did on my downloaded copy) so it's easier to tell where to start for certain subjects.

 

2) This might not be possible now but if any of Greg's posts exist, those quotes are still missing... I think...?

 

 

To the general announcement, same basic reactions as before, except this presumably means I get to repost all my old fanfics finally (I was hoping to do major edits and do that anyways but now there's less pressure to ensure major changes; I can just repost 'em all.... or so I assume... *goes and checks* Yay!) Of course, I have one I apparently never posted the end to (forgot, got lazy, etc... so probably should worry about that first. Plus I think most of my after-posting edits are lost. All I've got saved is drafts. Awkward, but we'll live...

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

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I'm open to solutions of any kind, as I know that few people want to download those huge files.

They don't seem that huge to me from when I downloaded them before, honestly. My only suggestions are: 1) Renaming them with the year of the beginning (as I did on my downloaded copy) so it's easier to tell where to start for certain subjects. 2) This might not be possible now but if any of Greg's posts exist, those quotes are still missing... I think...?
1) I'll try to patch in this fix. Shouldn't be too hard. 2) I'm searching up the results from the 2003 table, and I do have a few 2010 ones scattered on my flash drive. But for the most part, they are gone. :( I think I'm just going to make a post in my What Greg Has To Say About Current Storyline Topic with the posts off my drive as soon as I can get back to a computer, then log the HTML from the 2003 later. (I doubt that it will be of any use, though. Mostly just for fun. :shrugs:)

To the general announcement, same basic reactions as before, except this presumably means I get to repost all my old fanfics finally (I was hoping to do major edits and do that anyways but now there's less pressure to ensure major changes; I can just repost 'em all.... or so I assume... *goes and checks* Yay!) Of course, I have one I apparently never posted the end to (forgot, got lazy, etc... so probably should worry about that first. Plus I think most of my after-posting edits are lost. All I've got saved is drafts. Awkward, but we'll live...

Indeed. My memory says that many after-posting edits were in TI. :shrugs: I don't know if this will help, but it seemed like a random chapter got saved out of that one as well.
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Indeed. My memory says that many after-posting edits were in TI. :shrugs: I don't know if this will help, but it seemed like a random chapter got saved out of that one as well.

Hm. I'll have a looksee, thanks. I guess I should actually check all my stories rather than just assume they're all gone.

 

Note: a new Greg-central official topic is in the works (not as restrictive as past ones, though), so could you PM me links to any updated file downloads you do get? Whatever's most current. (The main focus of the topic will be to link to all of Erebus's topics and to cite anything Greg says on the LEGO forum, but any Greg-related discussion could go there.)

The Destiny of Bionicle (chronological retelling of Bionicle original series, 9 PDFs of 10 chapters each on Google Drive)Part 1 - Warring with Fate | Part 2 - Year of Change | Part 3 - The Exploration Trap | Part 4 - Rise of the Warlords | Part 5 - A Busy Matoran | Part 6 - The Dark Time | Part 7 - Proving Grounds | Part 8 - A Rude Awakening | Part 9 - The Battle of Giants

My Bionicle Fanfiction  (Google Drive folder, eventually planned to have PDFs of all of it)

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Oh thank goodness. It's terrifying to think of all those noobish, idiotic things I posted just for the sake of posting, and not to actually benefit any discussion. >_>

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Indeed. My memory says that many after-posting edits were in TI. :shrugs: I don't know if this will help, but it seemed like a random chapter got saved out of that one as well.

Hm. I'll have a looksee, thanks. I guess I should actually check all my stories rather than just assume they're all gone. Note: a new Greg-central official topic is in the works (not as restrictive as past ones, though), so could you PM me links to any updated file downloads you do get? Whatever's most current. (The main focus of the topic will be to link to all of Erebus's topics and to cite anything Greg says on the LEGO forum, but any Greg-related discussion could go there.)
That sounds good. :) I'm in favor of retiring my old topic anyway on the grounds that it's a mess and somewhat redundant with my file downloads. (It was to solve a different problem the S&T forum...er, still has, but on different subjects.) Better to just have everything in one place. Anyway, I'll PM you tommorrow with what I've got.
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Well, that's quite a shame to see all of that history become lost. But considering the situation, I understand it's for the best.

 

Look on the bright side, it seems a lot of us are actually glad to be rid of our old noobish posts. I'm no different. It was right here on BZPower, not long after I had joined 9 years ago, that I committed what I consider to be my biggest blunder on the internet. Let's just say there's a reason why I refuse to use profanity anywhere on the internet. (Hey, some lessons have to be learned the hard way. :shrugs: )

Formerly known as Takanuva's Symbol, I rejoined BZPower on October 10, 2012.

These days, I am perhaps best known for my obsession with all Lego video games.

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Since none of the posts were able to be retrieved anyway, there's no reason to keep basically the shell of the old site intact. Nostalgia runs high for a good lot of us, but what's the point in keeping around a hollow forum without posts? I am somewhat surprised that there wasn't an installable backup, but c'est la vie. (To be honest, I'm actually kind of glad that no one will have to be subjected to my noobish posts ever again. Definitely will not miss those first couple thousand posts!)

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It is... difficult... to put my feelings into words in an acceptable manner.

 

Yes, I understand that the archives being unstable means that they can be a target for more potential hacking incidents. Yes, I understand that the archives existed as BZPower frozen in time, a place where no one can post and there is nothing to do, a relic of the past. Yes, I can see that many of us are overjoyed to see their old noobish days stricken from the internet forever. Yes, I understand that we must move on from the past and focus on the future.

 

But given that BZPower was such a large part of my life for those six years, from the day I joined in September 2004 to the day in April 2011 when the forums went offline without notice, it pains me to see all those years of my life vanish into oblivion. Yes, all my own noobish days will be gone for good, for whatever that's worth. But in the later years, I spent a lot of my time writing, and while I wrote most of my stuff in Microsoft Word before posting it on BZPower, I would always tinker and edit my work to improve it over the years, and I never got a chance to save these improvements. And not just my own posts, either. Dino Attack RPG was over two hundred pages and nearly six years of a large collaborative group effort, and I was actually in the process of archiving it when the forum archives went offline without notice again thanks to... someone who has too much time on his hands yet lacks the maturity to do anything good with it. And there were many other topics, too, from the Alpha Team RPGs to the Official Rock Raiders Topic, where I have many nostalgic memories of the times I spent there and the people I knew there. And now, I don't even get the chance to properly archive them, since many of them have been reduced to empty topics without posts.

 

Again, I understand the reasons behind this decision. But, however selfish it may seem of me to feel frustration over this final outcome, it's not just me who is losing those years, but countless other members as well.

 

Supposedly, there is another individual out there known as "Lime Paradox" who has "the SQL file that the staff needs to restore the database". Although the means by which he acquired this file are... rather distasteful, has any effort to investigate this been made?

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Well, this is a bit of a disappointment. I often enjoy looking at old, defunct sites on archive.org, but sometimes the best way to find the URL for such a site is to find a place where people were linking to and discussing it at the time. BZPower was often one of the last places you could find contemporary discussions of defunct sites on the live web.But at the same time, I see this as a hindrance; nothing more. Our presence on this site shouldn't have to depend on its history as a crutch. There will be other ways to find discussion of BIONICLE from years gone by. And in fact, this could be a great opportunity for many people to start fresh, rather than being burdened with noobish mistakes from back in the day. So let's just make the most of this, and take a break from looking back to focus on what we're doing now.

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^If it's SQL, it's a likely scam. SQL is an incredibly insecure programing language that hackers actually inject into websites to take them out. I wouldn't go for it, much as I want the archives back.

Any database export will (usually) be in an SQL format. Yes, you can make any file type insecure. I have SQL backups of The Ninjago Wiki, The Chima Wiki, Brickimedia, and BS01, so just because it's SQL doesn't mean it's malicious. ;)

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News reporter and database administrator at Brickset

Administrator at BIONICLEsector01

 

DISCLAIMER: All opinions and contributions made under this account are based solely on my own personal thoughts and opinions, and in no way represent any of the above groups/entities. If you have any concerns or inquiries about the contributions made under this account, please contact me individually and I will address them with you to the best of my ability.

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Years upon years of site history...gone.

 

:crying:

I occasionally return to BZP for a nostalgic trip back. Hit me up on discord if you need anything. 
 
BZPRPG Characters that I will possibly revive, Mons-Shajs-Tarotrix-Aryll Vudigg-Jorruk Yokin-Senavysh Angavur

 

 

 

 

 

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In addition to the general sadness of losing our history, another sad thing is that I wasn't able to use the search function due to not being able to log in, but had been under the impression that it'd be fixed at some point and I could carry out proper examinations of the past. But I guess at this point that will never happen.

 

The long downtime, the serials being abandoned, the official sites closing, now this...despite all the hard work of the staff and members, Bionicle's online presence only ever seems to be declining. What future do we have at this point?

this is so disappointing! wait, I just joined and now it is too late ;(

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^If it's SQL, it's a likely scam. SQL is an incredibly insecure programing language that hackers actually inject into websites to take them out. I wouldn't go for it, much as I want the archives back.

As I figured. It was a fool's hope at best, but desperation can lead to foolishness.

 

Now, just out of curiosity, when is the latest complete backup of the pre-2011 BZPower forums that we have? I know that, at one point, the forums were completely backed up in September 2008, which some of you may remember as the backup that we had to revert to following the Time Slip/Great Dataclysm of March 2009. Yes, that backup would still be missing over two and a half years of content, but it would have much more than we have right now. Since I'm not involved with the running and maintenance of this website, I have no idea how often backups are made or how long they're kept around before being deleted to make room for more disc space or something, but I would hope that there might have been at least a few more backups made since then.

 

And, if such a backup exists, would you be willing to... well, shall I say, "take requests"? By that, I mean, if I member wanted to have access to a particular topic that he/she wants archived for personal purposes, would you be willing to send them a HTML, TXT, or other such file containing only that topic, in a similar vein to the archived Official Greg Discussion that was posted earlier in this topic?

 

As I said, it doesn't even have to be a backup from 2011, especially since it sounds like all complete 2011 backups have been corrupted in this incident. But so long as it's a complete backup that isn't missing posts (i.e. containing all posts from July 2005 through September 2008, as opposed to five posts from 2005, twelve from 2006, two from 2007, so on and so forth... which, incidentally, is the state of numerous topics in the current archive), it would be very useful and very much appreciated. As they say, "better two-thirds than nothing".. or maybe it's a different expression I'm thinking of...?

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^If it's SQL, it's a likely scam. SQL is an incredibly insecure programing language that hackers actually inject into websites to take them out. I wouldn't go for it, much as I want the archives back.

As I figured. It was a fool's hope at best, but desperation can lead to foolishness.

 

Now, just out of curiosity, when is the latest complete backup of the pre-2011 BZPower forums that we have? I know that, at one point, the forums were completely backed up in September 2008, which some of you may remember as the backup that we had to revert to following the Time Slip/Great Dataclysm of March 2009. Yes, that backup would still be missing over two and a half years of content, but it would have much more than we have right now. Since I'm not involved with the running and maintenance of this website, I have no idea how often backups are made or how long they're kept around before being deleted to make room for more disc space or something, but I would hope that there might have been at least a few more backups made since then.

 

And, if such a backup exists, would you be willing to... well, shall I say, "take requests"? By that, I mean, if I member wanted to have access to a particular topic that he/she wants archived for personal purposes, would you be willing to send them a HTML, TXT, or other such file containing only that topic, in a similar vein to the archived Official Greg Discussion that was posted earlier in this topic?

 

As I said, it doesn't even have to be a backup from 2011, especially since it sounds like all complete 2011 backups have been corrupted in this incident. But so long as it's a complete backup that isn't missing posts (i.e. containing all posts from July 2005 through September 2008, as opposed to five posts from 2005, twelve from 2006, two from 2007, so on and so forth... which, incidentally, is the state of numerous topics in the current archive), it would be very useful and very much appreciated. As they say, "better two-thirds than nothing".. or maybe it's a different expression I'm thinking of...?

 

 

I got the impression that the hacker deleted the backups of the backups of the backups, and what's in the current archive now is all they've got, complete or incomplete.

Edited by fishers64
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Shame that we have to lose this due to some malicious individual. Hopefully someone somewhere has the Greg discussion thread backed up.

 

On the plus side, my early posts are now lost forever.

Edited by J46 Nui

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Shame that we have to lose this due to some malicious individual. Hopefully someone somewhere has the Greg discussion thread backed up.

 

I do indeed have a backup, right here.

 

(Dumb) Question: Do the old GIF emotions in the archives pose a security hazard? Are they going to be deleted along with the archives, rendering this Tracker Ticket Fix void? Not the end of the world, just wondering.

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I got the impression that the hacker deleted the backups of the backups of the backups, and what's in the current archive now is all they've got, complete or incomplete.

This is correct. What is currently in the archives is what we have available.

(Dumb) Question: Do the old GIF emotions in the archives pose a security hazard? Are they going to be deleted along with the archives, rendering this Tracker Ticket Fix void? Not the end of the world, just wondering.

No, the emoticons will still work.
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And they say that anything we ever post on the Internet will be there forever. THEY LIE! :P

...maybe we could get a backup copy of the database from "them"?In all seriousness, though, this is very depressing. I understand not caring about discussions and so on- frankly, I don't either- but what about content that was produced by content-producing members and posted here? Epics, stories, comedies. RPGs. Games. Stuff we didn't think to back up ourselves, or stuff from members long gone. Most of my newer short stories I have saved on my own computer, but how many people really write and archive all their posts to a forum RPG or something like that?I understand that there's really nothing you can do if the data just isn't there anymore, though. Edited by TakunuvaC01
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Hurray! My noobishness is buried forever!

 

 

snip

 

snip

Have you seen the amount of banned members? That's not a good reason, but still.

 

Okay, I could have sworn you were on that list. I must be getting you mixed up with someone else.

 

@iBrow: You mean the original TvT, right?

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Hurray! My noobishness is buried forever!

 

 

snip

snip
Have you seen the amount of banned members? That's not a good reason, but still.
Okay, I could have sworn you were on that list. I must be getting you mixed up with someone else. @iBrow: You mean the original TvT, right?
Um... huh?

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Hurray! My noobishness is buried forever!

 

 

snip

snip
Have you seen the amount of banned members? That's not a good reason, but still.
Okay, I could have sworn you were on that list. I must be getting you mixed up with someone else. @iBrow: You mean the original TvT, right?
Um... huh?

 

He relied to the wrong post. And IBrow's post was deleted.

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