Not all of it remains.
I remember the Great Purge of 2012, and we lost Vlad as a result... he was ****** as some of his ride reports were wiped out. I think he had an excellent James Bay run posted that was deleted. He blew up, asked to be banned, and his wish was granted:
http://www.gtamotorcycle.com/vbforu...threads-gone-GTAM-history-wiped-out-Who-cares
Interesting thread, thanks. From what I read it looks like there was a situation where either the SQL database got unwieldy large and the forum slowed down and efforts to releive the problem went awry, or there was a catastrophic failure of some sort. Many of you guys were here long before me and are probably better aware of the whole situation.
From a forum administrators point of view (I have a few years of experience, suffice to say back to the BBS era for those who know what that was), I know the pain though. I've had databases supernova or or get corrupted, and the pain and time involved in trying to put the pieces back together (all while members are left wondering WTF is going on while the forum URL 404's, or worse yet, overwriting things or starting from scratch) is typically underestimated by the members. It can also lead to a lot of hard feelings, as was evidenced in that thread. It can also mean a lot of sleepless nights, and lost days at work which mean real-world financial impact for those trying to put the pieces back together again.
When forums are a labor of love vs a business, this sort of stuff happens. Most members don't have any idea the logistics behind the scenes that keeps a
big forum going, or the costs..or the time. It's not small. Currently, I personally oversee the server side of things on a handful of smaller forums now, and those pretty much maintain themselves along with the staff looking after day to day ops, but when forums reach into the millions of posts and tens or hundreds of thousands of threads, things change - it's not a tiny operation anymore.
As Rob touched on in that thread way back when, and still holds true today, at least the forum isn't owned by Autoforums. Yes, that sort of catastrophic failure wouldn't likely have happened if it was...because although they have lots of database and server experts on direct staff, backup plans galore, and even more emergency staff on call, the tradeoff is being just another corporate advertising-laden forum on the Rolodex. As someone who just retired about a year ago after about 5 years on staff at one of Autoforums largest forums, 450,000 threads, 4.5 million posts, I can tell you that it was often a very, VERY frustrating experience from an administrator's point of view. They have the knowhow, they have the $$$ for big servers, but they also have a business plan that involves monetizing the places they take over, and that's not always pretty.
Ultimately, forums like this where they're still operated by the original founding staff become a labor of love (at often much time and expense) that the members don't often appreciate enough.
... again the 'shop' you are going to is giving you bad info.
