I don't know what the chances of getting the proper AF database back are, but there is a lot cached out there, other than the private forum sections. WayBack only has material up to about 2008, so it's use will be a bit limited as the probably about a third of the threads started later.

If cached material has to be used to recover posts, then probably the best place to start is the index pages. This is because it gives you the forum, the thread title, the thread number and the number of pages that need to be found. Then you can look for the threads on cached pages and extract the posts by number. I'll try to find some of the Citroen forum index pages and see how easy it is to make a list.

With the 504 blog, I needed to find the 11 cached pages from both Google and Bing, with two of them being found via the heading and page number rather than the thread number. It's not always immediately obvious.

Since the AF forum used a common board programme, there may even be an existing tool to extract the posts from a google cache and put them in a database. Anyone know??? Ideally, you'd like to be able to submit a cached page URL or web archive file as input, have a tool read it's source and record each post by thread and post number. If I had to, I know I could write something to do it given enough time, but someone needs to drive any attempt to capture and manipulate cached pages. That's obviously not me.