Reply To: Where is the past 20 years of forum information?

[69mustang302]

Just adding to this thread and what I have found:
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I raised the issue about the lost forum data at that last Victoria meeting after speaking to Macka earlier. Nobody knows what’s happened or if the posts will be restored and the answers ranged from lost, cannot be restored, will be partially restored, will take time before there’s an answer!

Not satisfied with this, I’ve looked into this further using the tools I know of to establish for myself, a clearer view of the issue that can be put back to the National Committee and have the web administrator to respond to specifics.

This is going to be a lengthy (and possibly boring) post, but I think it’s better to have this outlined for others to see and contribute their thoughts and views with the specific intent of restoring the forum and its content.

Some background:

The Mustang Owners Club of Australia National Committee Wed Site Team are:

Web Coordinator: -Tony Kilvington (South Australia)

Web Editor: – Dan Comley who is Cloudmesh, (‘Web Design by Cloudmesh’ is identified in the website page footers)

Prior to 2021, Peter Preneas (New South Wales) was the Web Editor and was also the ‘Super Admin’ of the forum. Eddie Hadley (new South Wales) was the Web Coordinator.

On the Cloudmesh facebook page back in July 11, 2019, there was a post that Cloudmesh had been engaged by the Mustang Owners Club of South Australia to build a new online presence to promote the club. https://www.facebook.com/100057694681261/posts/1344707345692613/

The original forum appeared to have been linked to the ‘mustang.org.au’ website from its inception through to March 2021, i.e. to access the forum, the link was: mustang.org.au/forum under the mustang.org.au website tree-structure.

In 2021, a subdomain was created, and the forum address was changed to forum.mustang.org.au but was still pointed to the long-standing original forum board.

At the start of 2025, the web address: forum.mustang.org.au was pointed to the current forum page which is managed within a WordPress Content Management System.

None of the historical forum data was transferred to the new forum.

The Stats from original forum as at December, 2024 were:

292,848 Posts in 27,047 Topics by 6,148 Members – ran for 20 years, (an enormous amount of knowledge about mustangs and working on them in Australia was held here).

At the time of writing this, the new forum had 126 members which includes 10 businesses without any direct or indirect links to the Mustang Community.

Is the original forum lost?

No, it’s highly likely that it is dormant and in the background on the web hosting service, i.e. nothing is pointing to it. It would be incredibly negligent of the Web Administrators to have deleted it, however only the Web Editor, Dan Comley can answer this. If incredulously it was deleted, there will be multiple backups of the database and these could be used to reinstate the original forum.

If it is dormant, the link to the forum on the Mustang Owners Club of Australia website could be pointed back to the original forum service and it would be active again, as it was in December 2024.

Why didn’t they transfer the data from the original forum to the new forum?

I’m not sure how they could have decided to create a new forum and throw out 20 years of community history, or how they thought the new forum would be better without the historical data being imported. The data can be imported however it requires significant time and effort and there will be shortfalls, i.e. passwords on user accounts won’t be transferred, just to name one issue.

Fundamentally the database structure varies between the 2 forums. The original forum was using Simple Machines Forum (SMF) which is free, open-source forum software designed to help create an online community where people can register, post topics, and reply to others. It’s one of the classic and popular choices for building message boards.

Directly importing a Simple Machines Forum (SMF) MySQL database into a WordPress-managed forum is NOT plug-and-play but it is possible — with the right migration process.

Why it’s not a direct transfer:

• SMF has a very different database structure from WordPress and its forum plugins.

• SMF stores users, posts, threads, boards, permissions in custom MySQL tables.

• WordPress forums expect WordPress-native post types and meta data formats.

So the data can’t just copied the SMF tables into WordPress’s MySQL — it must be converted using tools and then manually fixing issues the tools cannot manage.

Can the old forum be accessed now?

There are digital archives of the ‘mustang.org.au’ website that go back to around 2002 that can be accessed via the ‘Wayback Machine’ on the ‘web.archive.org’ website. These are ‘date stamps’ or ‘snapshots’ of a website across time by capturing webpages, they’re not backups, they’re effectively flat pages with hyperlinks to other flat pages that were date stamped at the time, i.e. they are not querying a database for the latest updates. If you want to know more about this resource, you can find it here on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine

Some of these ‘snapshots’ are quite comprehensive, and you can look through a significant number of posts, while others have only the frontpages, or sometimes nothing.

All the snapshots going back to 2002 for the mustang.org.au website can be accessed using the following link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/mustang.org.au

The following link provides access to the http://www.mustang.org.au/forum snapshots up to 2021

https://web.archive.org/web/20161001000000*/www.mustang.org.au/forum

The following link provides access to the forum.mustang.org.au snapshots from 2021

https://web.archive.org/web/20210701000000*/forum.mustang.org.au

In summary:

These are the questions I’ll put to the National Committee and web coordinator / editor:

1. Has the original forum been deleted and therefore no longer available on any hosting service?
2. Are there backups of the original form?
3. Are the National Committee allowing 20 years of community engagement and knowledge of Mustangs in Australia to be lost?
4. The new forum format is not a community board like the original forum and therefore cannot replicate the functionality and information accessibility that is common across mustang forum communities locally and worldwide like the Vintage Mustang Forum, MustangTech, 69Stang, etc. Are they going to continue with this abstract approach that hasn’t gained any momentum since they launched format, noting there wasn’t any consultation with the forum community with it’s launch?
5. The current forum, lacks engagement, moderators, admin responsiveness, community buy-in and logical structure. The attempt to manage it with the current content Management System (wordpress), does not bring any value, so why pursue it instead of maintaining the current forum and its history?

The following links should display datastamp examples of the historical footprints of the mustang.org.au website across the years

https://web.archive.org/web/20060424074604/http://www.mustang.org.au/

https://web.archive.org/web/20060307051217/http://www.mustang.org.au/forum/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190304013035/https://mustang.org.au/index.php

https://web.archive.org/web/20200229224533/https://www.mustang.org.au/forum/

https://web.archive.org/web/20241207110532/https://forum.mustang.org.au/

Cheers

Mike (@69mustang302)

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web.archive.org

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