Visitors must be aware of the Old DCBoard Forum that existed from 2001 to 2008 that ultimately had to be taken down due to Spam and DB issues and replaced by vBulletin. This board has been broken and unreadable for quite a long time. Initially the pages were accessible but slowly as the software ‘broke’ and was not supported, finding information became that much tougher. Ultiamtely all the files were ‘dumped’ into text files and put up in the archive .. Some of them were visible through Google Search and returned as links to direct text files –
eg. http://www.rafcommands.com/dcforum/DCForumID6/Data/6568.txt
Even then the text files were without “Word Wrapping” and were in URL Encoded format that required parsing through external tools or websites to be made readable.
To get over this problem, we just completed a data extraction exercise that will host the older forum text files into readable HTML files without special characters or need for third party tools or sights.
For example, any older post from DCBoards can be accessed via the archive URL simply by using the “Thread Number”.. eg, the above text file can be parsed into a readable HTML file by using http://www.rafcommands.com/archive/06568.php
There are nearly 15000 such “files” that needed to be rebuilt and uploaded – and these will all be online by end of Saturday, September 28th. The pages will also carry Google Ads ,in nominal numbers as a measure to generate revenue for the site.
A more difficult task of building index pages and getting these pages indexed in search engines like Google lies ahead and will be carried out over the next few weeks.