I can now report on my experiment with a gig on Fiverr that offered to “Download an entire website from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine”. You can only choose one date to grab, and hope for the best. I had picked a date in late 2015.
Joseph came through and provided a 310mb .ZIP containing 1.1Gb of archive that Archive.org had backed up from the RDNA forums. 3,000+ forum threads, plus individual posts, back to 2005. It’s something I’d have never have obtained otherwise, since it involves typing in command lines and other ikky stuff. He knows how to do it, and is happy to do so for just £6. I’ll use him again for this sort of thing.
I didn’t expect Joseph to re-link everything, and make the RDNA forums ‘as if on a working site again’ — because it was a .PHP driven site. For that reason, it’s highly unlikely to ever go online again as a working site.
Once the delivered .ZIP was extracted I then had dtSearch index all text in the files, thus providing desktop keyword-search across the archive. If you’re following in my footsteps, and need a free desktop search tool, then DocFetcher is a good freeware equivalent to the paid dtSearch.
Here’s what I get on a test search across the archive. Definitely worth $6 to save this sort of knowledge, I’d say…
Possibly some of the Poser official forum was later ported to Smith Micro, but I also see Okham stuff back in 2005, on this search. It’s likely only a partial capture, but it’s pretty large.
Update: Community archive of the old Runtime DNA forums at the Internet Archive.
Heavy Vue users may also be interested in grabbing the old and vanished Cornucopia forums. Does anyone have the URL which those used be located at? Update: found it at cornucopia3d .com / forum / index.php — but Archive.org does not appear, at any point in time, to have archived any of the actual posts. Just the names of the forum threads.