VFRDiscussion.com is back as a read-only archive - vfrdiscussion-archive.org

Hi all,

Like many of you I bought my VFR (a 5th gen) and immediately found that half the answers to my questions, apart from the ones I could find here, lived on vfrdiscussion.com, and then the site went dark. The database was lost and the owner decided to shut it down. 24 years of guides, troubleshooting threads and mods, gone.

So I rebuilt it from what the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and Common Crawl had captured over the years:
https://vfrdiscussion-archive.org

What's there now:

• 14,987 threads and 239,000 posts, 2002–2026, from 8,800 members
• all the maintenance guides, grouped by system (brakes, electrical, engine, suspension, wheels…)
• full-text search, and every thread on its own URL so Google will index it again
• every thread shows where and when it was captured, and how many posts were recovered, nothing has been filled in or edited

It's strictly read-only. No accounts, no posting, no ads, no tracking. Posts are credited to their original authors. If you wrote something and want it removed, open an issue at the GitHub repo and it's gone. The code and the recovered data are open (https://github.com/vfrdiscussion-archive/vfrdiscussion-archive) so the archive doesn't depend on me, anyone can mirror it.

What's missing, and where you come in
The crawlers never saw everything. Roughly speaking:

• most photos are gone, the archives only caught about a third of the images, and anything on Photobucket or Tapatalk died with those services
• some threads were never captured, and long threads sometimes lost a page in the middle
• a few hundred posts have no date or forum

If you can help with any of the following, please get in touch (reply here or open a GitHub issue):

• A database backup. If you were a mod or admin, or know one, even an old backup helps. The IPS export format is perfect, but anything works.
• Images. If you saved your own how-to pictures, or have old threads saved as PDF/HTML, I can slot them back in.
• Missing threads. If you remember a thread that isn't there, tell me the title, sometimes there's a capture under a URL I haven't found.

Nothing is commercial about this and there's really no cost to keep it running. I just didn't want all that knowledge to disappear.

Thanks, and thanks to everyone who wrote those threads in the first place.

Max

 

Header build thread is there. https://vfrdiscussion-archive.org/t...-performance-header-now-in-production-in-usa/

Max, you had infinitely more knowledge on how to pull this together than I did. Great work.

 

youre a vfr hero, thanks

 

Thanks, Max. I wander thru the archives and let you know if I can fill in any of the blanks.

 

Well done Max. Have you contacted Miguel for a database copy? Maybe he still has one albeit at least a year old. Ah skip that, read in the other thread he is not sharing it with anyone. Too bad.

 

A true public service for the VFR faithful.