Any way to browse a website that has been shut down?

[Sully]

Hi folks,

For the past while now I've been on a mission to access some sections and threads of a forum I used to browse. Unfortunately, this forum was shut down in 2013 and the URL is no longer active.

It's a huge bummer as there are a lot of old e-fedding archives on the forum. Past promos and matches that I wanted to go back and salvage, but haven't been able to due to the forum being closed. I've tried some tools like Wayback Machine, but the screenshots for the forum are limited. The web crawlers mostly just took screenshots of the main forum index. There's no way through this for me to browse the forum and easily navigate through old threads.

I've even gone as far as emailing (and tweeting at) the owner of the website, but he's given me the silent treatment. I've gone as far as to even express interest in buying the defunct forum off of him so I could personally restore it to it's former state, and still no response. It's a little frustrating considering the forum is sitting there as dead space, but I can't force the guy to respond to me or consider an offer.

Do any of you tech savy gurus (I remember Slyfox was quite apt at this sort of stuff) know of any possible way I could browse the forum despite it being totally shut down, and Wayback screenshots being limited? I'd be grateful.

Hope you all are doing well.

[Slyfox696]

Unfortunately, there's probably not a lot you can do. Web forums typically work by having a programming front end talk to a database on the backend. While web crawlers will sometime index that data, I do not believe it is common or very thorough. Without access to the database itself, there's not really any way for you to be able to retrieve the data.

Your best bet is to continue trying to get the data owner to give you access, in whatever fashion that may be. But, just a warning, it's very possible if the forum was shutdown that long ago, the owner might not even have the data anymore. 7 years is a long time to keep an inactive database, especially since database software continues to update.

If ever you are able to get access to the data, and if you need/want help retrieving it, feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do to help. But, again, I wouldn't get my hopes up too high and I'd say there's a high probability that information is gone.