Lost Message Boards Revealed

You can never tell what someone might post on a message board, but when they do, they invariably expect the other members to respond. But sometimes that response isn't forthcoming because nobody's talking anymore or because the site has been removed. In some cases, this leaves people with seemingly endless threads to sift through in order to find relevant information. Well now one man has taken it upon himself to document the long-gone message boards of the internet before it's too late.

When he first embarked on his mission last year, he had only managed to retrieve just over 10% of lost boards and posts that belonged entirely on TheOtaku.com and 2ch (a Japanese site). But now, after much work, his collection of archived messages has grown to over 1,000 boards and over 11,000 posts. As one can imagine, the amount of time and personal investment required to collect such a massive database is no small feat. The result is that every post in the database is dated (the board was active during that date's range) and some even include information about when the site was moved or closed down.

A major part of his effort involves "sweeping" through message board threads for every piece of useful information—from comments on an anime or manga series to obscure trivia that never appeared in English-language communities. Occasionally, the project even includes the translation of Japanese messages into English. From time to time, he also finds entirely new boards whose posts are never archived and thus never translated. In those cases, his database helps preserve discussions that may have already ended or been removed by the original site owner.

The archive is also meant to serve as a "discussion platform" for many unknown ideas and historical events in anime and manga. Unsurprisingly, it includes a large amount of discussion about MySpace , Myspace2 , Hi5 , Friendster , LiveJournal , GameFAQs , and other defunct social networking sites that were once staples of internet culture circa 2005. Many of the discussions are very old and thread-narrow; the board owner (and sometimes its members) often seem to have disappeared. At times, the original poster or even his replies can't be found anywhere on the archive.

The database includes many boards centered around anime and manga: a large assortment of Dragon Ball Z , Naruto , One Piece , and other series. While some are just for translation requests, others serve as forums where fans can discuss anything ranging from character backstories to obscure anime references. The latter is especially interesting since some of these topics may never have been mentioned in English-speaking message boards or blogs before; they were simply not worth translating at that time.

While he has already collected over 1,000 boards so far, the archive's owner is only 20% complete. In order to ensure that his collection will not disappear due to database corruption or hard drive failure, he has begun a backup procedure that sets up a new machine with the same database and its mirror. He does this every week because the amount of data in his database is massive enough to take long periods of time to copy.

The website's homepage also includes an example search query: "Takashi Natsume" (the protagonist from both the manga and anime Natsume's Book of Friends ).

Conclusion and Information

So far, the database is still in its infancy stage, but the collection will grow to include the messages of many . Love Plus , and sites such as 2ch.net . For more information or to contribute content, he encourages people to contact him via email at this link . The full list of his online locations is below:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/details.php?id=9410816238&userid=928363959#main-content https://twitter.com/xCrownCaesar https://www.facebook.com/conflictofinterests http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/details.