Google seems to have the most cached material, followed by Bing and Yahoo. I think WayBack/IA will only be useful for some older threads.

It seems the last thread and post numbers were probably around 82,000 and 831,000, respectively. There's obviously a good portion of this that will never be recovered and a lot of those posts would have been either in threads that no longer matter or in 'private' threads that would seem to be simply unrecoverable as they were never cached. I haven't found anything at all from the Toad Pond, so I assume it's lost and Ken will have to restart that GW/AGW thread.

I've manually captured a good portion of the public thread archive index pages. Each page relates to a specific forum and has up to 250 thread titles listed. These will be in the order they were created as the overall site thread count would no doubt increment by 1 whenever anyone creates a new thread somewhere. For example, there are 73 pages of 250 for the Pug Forum, being almost 18,000 threads. The thread numbers can be extracted from the links in the source, but I've only been grabbing the cached pages so far. If the thread number is known, then it's easier to search for and find specific cached pages that are part of that thread. Numerous threads will have the same title! The automated cache grabbing is necessary to do it quickly, but some threads should be searched for and saved individually.

So far I've been able to find archive index pages for Social (Forum 10 Page 4 only of 5), Citroen (F11 29/35 pages), Peugeot (F12 54/72), Renault (F13 18/30), Simca (1/1), Chat (F14 13/26), Cars (F15 13/22), Tech (F17 7/19), Parts (F18 27/37), Chat Archive (F19 1/1), Motorsports (F24 3/5), Simca (F28, 1/1). The Simca forum has only one page with 228 entries from the start. Some were easy to find, other not so obvious. A lot of the links found went nowhere as they were not for cached pages.

Do we want to hand out pages of 250 threads to selectively search for and save? Not all will be found or even worth finding? Some should probably be ignored now, like the 'spotted' threads, but cars and parts threads can be useful.

Any thoughts?