Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

131 pointsstevengoodwin108 comments

I have a stack of printouts of various discussion forums from between 1991-4. Mostly chatter, but several interview transcriptions, news reports, and magazine articles that no longer appear to be online.

They vary from Billboard charts, to Associated Press reports on Michael Jackson's wealth, and Debbie Gibson discussion groups!

Are they useful/interesting as pieces of Internet history?

Are the copyright/privacy issues too onerous to scan/publish?

Do I simply send a box of paper to archive.org to worry about?

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Happy to take them.

This is Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, by the way. (jscott@archive.org). Knowing how HackerNews is, I am sure this comment will end up buried far beneath the thread.

It has - but I conscientiously recheck my threads for new insight! :) Will email you when I know everything that I have!

I'd be kicking myself if I did not go out of my way to thank you for your service.

Jason Scott is an international treasure. While the Internet Archive is many people, Jason goes above and beyond.

He won't ask but I will: please consider donating directly to Jason:

> Venmo is @textfiles and jason@textfiles.com is Paypal

Give me Debbie Gibson and anyone in 14-year-old orbit of me doesnt get hurt.

Thank you for what you do!

Hey there, I do some work with the Archive folks as an ad hoc physical archive volunteer. I'll pay for you to ship them and facilitate getting them ingested into items and a collection if you'd like. Let me know how to get in touch.

Once scanned, derive operations will take care of OCR and generating relevant metadata from the artifacts. If there are any issues (copyright, etc) preventing these items from being public, they'll be made private by patron services.

(no affiliation with the Archive, just a volunteer)

Do you take MYSQL backups of complete BBS sites?

https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-upload-files-to-create-...

https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive might be helpful

If you have an artifact in digital format already, you can self serve and don't need my help. Patron services at the org can provide guidance if you are unsure of item value, upload mechanics, collections, metadata, etc.

I ran a website where people uploaded game save files along with an screenshot of their game world for a few years. It had maybe 10k+ submissions and was a mildly popular game. I took it offline years ago though. Is this something worth archiving?

100% yes!

Sure, why not, could be interesting

We don't really know what the future might find interesting so saving as much as possible seems like a good thing to do.

Random on-disk game saves is how some MMO server projects have been revived by communities. It could also help someone re-implement the game engine having various copies of a game save. You would be surprised how useful archiving game files can be for someone who really wants to re-build a legacy game.

Yes, please consider doing so.

Given I'm UK-based, postage might be a bit steep. Let me see how much stuff _isn't_ still out there.

FWIW, on most other systems I'm contactable via @marquisdegeek

Jason/textfiles said they’d take them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882079

Maybe this FAQ about physically donating stuff to the internet archive answers some questions for you

https://help.archive.org/help/frequently-asked-questions/

Its a shame, Google used to host Usenet groups and the other day I clicked a link of something old that Google was supposed to be hosting, and got literally nothing back.

Dear Google, you could have added ads to those old results to justify keeping them up, but you failed because you're more interested in locking things down than actually building up an open web.

Now there's decades worth of old usenet content probably gone, my understanding is a lot of it was donated by old usenet providers that shut down or just couldnt keep hosting really old but historic texts for whatever reason.

The added irony is that the oldest threads are the most interesting.

Yeah they really are. I would have paid Google $3 a month just for them to keep them online on the odd chance I want to read them. Shit Google, make a usenet service for me to subscribe to, it'll be the only thing you'll have with me giving you money.

A question from someone a bit younger:

What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?

It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.

What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.

> Disk drives did exist.

They did, but FWIW, they were very small and fairly expensive compared to contemporary times. The attitude towards using disk space was a bit different back then, because it was a much scarcer and more valuable resource.

Furthermore, there was probably more of a reflexive printing things out at that point which took a long time to break. I certainly downloaded BBS and Usenet forums to read offline on my computer but a lot of us printed a lot of stuff out on a daily basis. It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home because there’s a lot of info like trip itineraries I want in hardcopy.

> Furthermore, there was probably more of a reflexive printing things out at that point which took a long time to break.

Absolutely. Back in that era printing things was just "what you did" if you wanted some combination of permanent / portable / offline accessible. FSM only knows how many trees I am responsible for killing back in the day, printing stuff that I would never bother printing now. But over time we got more comfortable with not needing everything on paper, and so now...

> It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home

... I am one of those people. I don't own a printer and rarely print anything. On the infrequent occasions when I do want paper copy of something, I just send it to a nearby Fedex Store or UPS Store and have it printed there.

I’m a 30+ minute roundtrip by car to retrive something printed which I do semi-regularly for recipes, travel/event info, and just important info I want to file. I have plenty of room and B&W laser printers are cheap.

I DID give up on quality inkjet photo printers. That I’ll just send out to some online printer. Which I rarely do; I only have so much wall space.

Makes sense. For me, I can literally walk to the nearest UPS Store, and the nearest Fedex Store is 10 minutes away by car and ~30 minutes by bicycle. And since I print so infrequently, I can get by without having a printer at home at all.

But yeah, for people who are much further away from a printing location or who print more frequently, it would definitely still make sense to have a home printer.

They did but were rather small and unreliable - for instance around 300-500 MB and could easily die. People printed stuff for the same reason books exist - storage and mobility, neither of which were easily available. I used to print source code just to review in silence. Might print backup emails to ensure durability.

> for instance around 300-500 MB

I mean, that's more than enough for text downloaded from a usenet group. Printing that much plaintext out would be something.

Which were connected to the very expensive machine that a whole household shared.

In mid-late 90s central Texas, a well-off family might have had one PC and a second phone line shared between Internet access and the kids, as well as a dot matrix printer or even an inkjet (ink was a LOT cheaper back then), but only the most indulged (or nerdy, spending their savings on that instead of driving expenses) kids would have had their own PCs.

There was also no one way to store information. Some people still had floppy disks, then the smaller hard disks, then CD ROM -- it was all over the place.

Saving locally to a desktop computer surely existed back then, I even did it myself sometimes.

But then you have to be seated at that desktop computer to read it

Indeed.

I was just pointing out that saving locally (the original question) has nothing to do with googling about laptops and smartphones (the condescending reply).

Not OP, but I used to do this regularly in the early '90s.

I accessed Usenet from my university, printed it very cheaply, and brought it home.

My home PC didn't have any internet connection until a couple of years later when I could afford a 9600bps modem.

As to diskdrives, when I started our uni-workstations could'nt read a dos/win3.1 disk

Reading it on the go was a lot of it. Most of the things of the things I printed out at the time was because i wanted read it on the way to or from school.

Saving it locally wasn't as viable as it is today due to smaller storage drive sizes. Previously everything was printed out (or typed out via typewriter) and that was a norm for society for a long time.

Other folks have mentioned several other reasons, I'll just mention screen tech. My first monitor (bought in '93) was a 640x480 pixel 13" CRT screen. (And that was expensive - the Mac Classic had 512 × 342 mono, pretty comparable to the Apple Watch.)

Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.

I do wonder about the relative cost of paper to digital storage mediums of the time. It could be that would have something to do with it.

Take for example the fact that (testing with a 150kb block of lorem ipsum text) you could easily squeeze the text capacity of a 3.5mm floppy into around 20 pages of physical text. 10 sheets of double-side printed paper and some ink might well have been cheaper than the floppy it would be intended to replace.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any good resources on the cost-per-page of printing back in the day. So I can't really put hard numbers to this. Printing is incredibly cheap now (for text at least, printing photos uses so much ink) and I can't imagine it was all that more expensive back when most work people did still relied on printing off documents and hand signing them. (physical bill printing, checks, physical contract signing, etc.)

Of course this is all speculation on my part, I was too young to care about money and how much things cost back when the my household had floppy disks and printed things off regularly. If someone has a better memory of the time I would really be interested to hear from someone who did pay attention to those things.

Printing was mostly about the cost of paper (and the amortized cost of the printer). Dot matrix ribbons were very cheap. Without deeply diving into them vs. now printer costs I’m guessing that dot matrix then vs. B&W laser now were similar in inflation-adjusted dollars and inkjets today probably actually cost more.

Use the internet archive to look at computer ads from the 80s-90s.

Early laser printers were very expensive for the printer but the toner was relatively cheap, and a ream of paper wasn't that expensive, either.

Check your math – the King James Bible in uncompressed plain text UTF-8 is 4.4 MB. A floppy fits waaaay more than 20 printed pages of text.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10

I printed out guitar tabs, source code, tech notes, jokes, etc so I could look at them in my room at my leisure. The family computer was in the office/computer room and was used by 3 or 4 people. If my sister was doing her homework, that took priority over reading 100 Jeff Foxworthy jokes.

Very often you could be using a 'fast' internet connection (T1 at school, library), and you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two. And it was unlikely you had a CD-RW drive (maaaybe a Zip disk), so it'd be hard to take it home and you wouldn't be able to save it locally.

Heck, even if you could save it locally, you might have only had a 500MB hard drive, it seems weird now because with TB drives, unless you are saving games/media, you have almost unlimited storage.

> you might have only had a 500MB hard drive

I mean that was already a massive amount of storage for plain text.

> you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two

And how does printing it on paper help with that? If anything, switching out the floppies and carrying them home is faster and easier than with hundreds (or thousands) of pages.

But I get your overall point of transferring the content home.

Printing stuff at school/work made it really easy to read stuff when you didn't have a computer at home. Besides the fact computers had fewer resources all around, personal ownership of computers was still a minority at the time. A floppy disk could store a bunch of text files but didn't do you a lot of good if you didn't have a computer at home.

We had tiny low resolution CRT displays back then, 640*480 pixels, 9" or so. 8*8 pixel fonts suck.

We were all used to reading text on paper in a much nicer format back then.

The typical text/graphic display of the day was about 36" * 24" and delivered daily on your doorstep for about $0.50 plus tip.

Printout wasn't as nice, but you could mark it up, and scroll was intuitive, as was copy and paste.

They are overpriced, but try reading a newspaper once... It's a completely different experience. You have no idea how nice it felt to have the Sunday newspaper and time to soak it in.

It was well written, and had no spam in it.

"Lack of good search engines" could also once again be said about the current state of SEO hijacking. There was a good 10 year period (I guess around 2000-2010 give or take) where you could truly find useful stuff via search.

Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.

>A question from someone a bit younger:

I mean.... likely more than "a bit" younger :)

1. Computer not always available. A lot of the time it could be a "Family Computer". Not "Personal Computer".

2. There were far more detailed discussions than today, but computer are not portable so you want to read it may be while you are in bed.

3. Access information has a cost. Not only does it take time on a dial up modem. Transfer ( In terms of Data / bytes ) isn't free and depending on settings / locations / plan you could be paying for it per visit.

That is from someone who used to print a lot of internet out in university.

Well, I'm over thirty, so I do remember metered connections and life without a smartphone. The shared computer reason explains it completely, thanks :)

From your initial comment I assumed a 14 year old to be fair.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just used to read books before I had mobile data. Never thought of printing out a discussion forum and don't remember anyone else doing so, that's why I was curious.

Sometimes people would post stuff that would be handy to have while away from the computer. In the late 90s, when Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was taking off, you could find black belts sharing advice on discussion boards (often very detailed). I would print it and take it to practice.

Damn really?? I have stacks and stacks of discussions from forums and various tutorials I printed off while at school to read later on at home. Everything from bind9 configuration to gun building.. On occasion I still pull some out to review.

You have to remember that there was a time when phone lines and internet connections shared resources. Also, the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is now, even a decade ago, so printing meant you had that copy locally without needing to wait for load times.

I have a couple of GameFAQs discussions and cheat lists for various PS2/GameCube games from the early 2000s. They're stowed in a folder because it was a hassle to run between the family room and my bedroom when referencing.

Also, for the longest time, a household shared a single computer. So printing off the pages meant I didn't need to compete between family members for computer use.

Edit: A friend just reminded me of navigating in the passenger seat with a stack of Mapquest prints.

Edit-2: If anyone wants to relive this in the modern world, print to PDF blog posts, news articles, etc., and store them on your Kindle (or equivalent). You'll notice you'll comprehend the article way better than on your phone or laptop.

Also in the pre-broadband era internet was commonly charged by the minute. Printing stuff out allowed you to read it in your own time without a ticking clock.

Of course you could save pages, or even print to PDF (after installing ghostscript). But that's nowhere near as comfortable to read

I felt like the PDF format must’ve been newer than the old dialup times, but it was released in 1993… TIL!

There was software for various different types of forums that was specifically designed to go online, download anything new, upload anything you composed online, and log off. Even if you weren’t getting charged by the minute by the BBS, you might have been getting charged $1 per minute by the phone company.

I too had printed copies of web pages (mostly cheats and guides for games that you simply couldn't access while a game was running!) but if I were to print out entire forum discussions, my parents would've killed me for using so much precious printer ink (and paper, probably).

So while I understand the need for printing out stuff back then, I'm a bit puzzled why someone would print out forum discussions per se.

If you don't have internet access at home, then you have limited options. You could save them to disk and hope they display OK at home. But this forces you to sit at the computer to read them, and assumes you actually have a computer at home.

Alternatively, you could print them out.

Back in the day a lot of video games had lore that was either made up or told telephone style. There wasn't exactly wikis on a lot of information to tell truth from fact.

So printing out the discussion allowed you to learn how to accomplish certain things or unlock certain items doing weird gamepad movement, even if it was false.

See Mew in Pokemon Y/B/R and the SS Anne truck: https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Mew_Under_the_T...

All you need is some troll posting how it worked for them, and you'd print out their instructions along with someone else who said they got it working the same way with a +1 step, and you're printing off the entire discussion, trying to get a Mew before school the next day to no avail.

My Dad wasn't going to let me hogging the family computer for hours playing on my gameboy for no reason.

I printed forum threads on OS installation/dual booting/BIOS stuff that I might need not having a phone with web access or another computer.

That's quite specific, but just one example. I think we could imagine a scenario where you might have printed any instructional thread. The interview transcriptions mentioned could've been for offline interview prep.

I remember printing out walkthroughs, cheat codes, game weapon/monster descriptions and level editor tutorials from the one dialup-internet connected computer in the house to be able to use them at the not-internet-connected gaming computer upstairs

Sometimes I'd also bring it along as reading material in a car ride etc...

There were also some games that didn't cope well with switching between fullscreen and desktop, so printed material helped there too!

Ah, memories of printing out the entire DooM FAQ because reading it on a small screen was annoying and not always available, other people needed to use the computer, too.

https://faqs.neoseeker.com/Games/PC/doom.txt

Imagine you have to print out map directions before you leave your house so you can reach your destination. Map quest and later google maps worked like this. Otherwise you would have to read a map while driving and even pull over.

And sometimes stop at a gas station to ask for directions. One of the memes that probably makes near zero sense to a young person today is a woman annoyed because the guy driving the car refuses to stop and ask how to get somewhere.

I used to print stuff out at school and take it home all the time. I fondly remember printing off guitar tabs, cheat codes, forum threads about computer troubles I was having etc (yes, I had a computer with no internet connection).

OP here:

Primarily to read them offline. These messages were usually part of usenet, or in emails lists, or held on (remote) servces like Mono at Imperial. You could read them on the HP-UX systems, via a dumb terminal, which were connected to the Internet, but not connected to a PC with a disk drive. (Well, there were a few PCs and Mac classics around, but not enough for everyone and - as an Amiga fan - there wasn't yet CrossDos to let me use compatible disks.)

Some items, like early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, I did print for archival purposes as I (foolishly) thought that they'd be spotted and taken down by the copyright police, and lost forever!

Spoiler alert: This was all around 1991

During those years there was no high speed internet for most residential users.

Typically an internet user would dial out with their physical phone line which was often also their home phone line (no mobile data).

A lot of internet service providers back then charged by the minute or hour to connect.

Collecting posts could let you collect more to read them offline.

Printing in general was more common (easy way to share with ppl who weren’t online) and a better reading experience than reading them on screen because the screen resolutions were still pretty low.

To generalize, systems (and local networks) were not constantly connected. Even “internet-connected” could mean just the ability to exchange data when requested by user or at regular intervals with some other system, maybe even only over certain protocols (like mail), instead of “always online”.

Imagine the pyramid: the amount of time user was interactively connected to some network service — the amount of time user was in front of (any) computer system — the rest of life activities.

Fully featured mail clients, news clients, FidoNet clients had many options to quickly mark message chains for download or export, and deal with them offline later. You could even dump all those updates to a floppy, give it to a modem-less user, then transfer replies for upload through the same “floppynet”. Communities also collected all kinds of FAQs for users to grab first and study offline before wasting time.

Similar solutions were needed for periods spent away from keyboard. If you were on a trip in a different city, you would have all the directions printed or simply written down instead of taking the computer with you.

Some documents were simply more usable when printed than when displayed screen-by-screen in text mode or low resolution. Some services/protocols did not implement live text search, and a glance at paper copy could be easier and faster. Later example of server-side state updates over slow channel is the existence of dedicated normal and print modes in old forum software. By default, a small number of messages is shown on each page to prevent long wait times for each page on dial-up. People who are sure they want to save or print the whole thread can choose much longer page that lacks online-oriented design features.

If you wanted to read at your couch or in the café it was the only viable option.

Reading at the desk was ok, but your CRT monitor was often low res and somewhat flickery (depending how sensitive to that you are).

Laptops (once they existed) had hilariously short battery life and dismal lcd based screens. I wouldn't recommend it.

I think I stopped printing stuff out pretty much exactly when laptops got good enough to use instead.

>Do I simply send a box of paper to archive.org to worry about?

That's what I would do, although I'd probably scan it for them, or at least would send an email first. Also, good on you for trying to preserve early internet history. You have my admiration.

You can scan and OCR (adobe) this yourself with not much more effort than boxing and shipping at FedEx

Then repost on related public-facing online forums or a free wordpress site or upload to archive.org

I get this answer a lot when I ask similar question but how do we scan it?

Taking a Photos of every print out from our Phone? That is 1000s of photos each needing to snap and focus.

Not everyone has a scanner, and not every scanner has automated tray feed. And even if they do the quality of their scan are really low by default.

I have similar question with Business Cards as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of them. But with no way to automatically archive them.

I use https://1dollarscan.com/ if I don't need the physical items back, and use https://www.scancafe.com/ if I do. Those digital files then get ingested into my workflow.

(no affiliation, just a customer)

I’ve used scancafe a number of times and actually wrote an early-on review for CNET.

One general piece of advice is that before you go crazy, think about what you really care about saving. There’s a cost to scanning of course. There’s also a cost to metadata and other cataloging so that you can actually find what you’ve scanned.

For photos everything is in Lightroom with at least a modicum of organization. When my dad decided he’d like a digital picture frame of older family pics it literally took me about 30 minutes to pull together.

This is a good point. For my use cases, I get a bulk rate, and dump everything into digital storage and a processing workflow. Once digital, it's a future problem, but at least it'll be preserved on disk and tape somewhere. Apple didn't have machine vision in photos when I started doing this, for example, so I lean heavily on Moore's Law (very broadly speaking about tech acceleration) that future tech will solve (facial recognition, OCR, machine vision metadata generation, generative AI) so save, digitize, preserve now when it is cheap to do so. Once gone, it is lost to the sands of time.

It’s certainly use case specific. In my case, less is more. A fairly heavily-curated collection of photos is more valuable to me than a data dump that may preserve some diamond in the rough that future tech may do something interesting with.

Photos of a historically interesting event? Sure. But for old family pics I’m happy to have hundreds of curated photos of mostly people and call it a day.

If you have an iPhone, the scan feature of the stock iOS file explorer is quite good. Just hover the phone on top of the documents and it auto-detects, crops and combines them into a pdf.

FedEx has large self-serve scanner/copiers where you just load up the pages and let it rip.

The only realistic way is to have a scanner with an automated feeder (which aren’t really all that expensive). I invested in a laser color printer years ago and I have not yet had to replace the toner. Otherwise you can also do it at your office or business centers at hotels (I’ve done this a few times and they don’t really care/notice). Worst case scenario would be a fedex location but that can get pricey very quickly since they charge by the sheet.

A friend of mine, technical but not a hacker, wanted to turn an old offline forum into a chatbot. I know there are many not so good RAGs to do this. What are the current best practices, as of this month?

I sort of regard these commenters as crazy. I never had the habit of printing stuff off so I could read it later. I read it online, or not at all. And by "online" I mean from computer storage on the screen, not necessarily over a modem connection or something.

The fundamental disconnect you guys have is this: in order to print something out, it needs to be stored somewhere first. So you indeed downloaded a text file in order to print it. Surely you saved it somewhere, at least in RAM if not permanent storage. Otherwise the printout wouldn't happen.

The sorts of things that I used the printer for were school reports and papers, and especially Print Shop style banners. It was really fun to run off a larger-than-life "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" sign that was basically professional DTP style with good fonts, graphics and the whole bit.

At school the chief use of the Line Printers was for large-format ASCII art. We'd take some GIFS of rather prurient pin-up shots, or anime or just some interesting subject, and run it through an ASCII art generator, then print out something suitable for covering an entire wall. Sometimes we'd even print out the Pascal code we were working on, so we could mark it up and sort of edit it offline. But that was the exception to prove the rule.

Given the years (91-94), it seems likely these were printed out a long time ago and have sat in filing boxes for nearly 30 years. Looking back it may seem crazy to print so many things out, but screen quality and norms have changed a lot since then!

To this day, many academics still print tons of papers out to read. I'm sure there are other niches where it is still considered normal to print - even though sure, you could argue that an iPad Pro + Pencil is advantageous if for no other reason than physical space.

edit: Could've made my point a bit better. I get where you are coming from. I just mean that at the time, I think more people would find it crazy to stock pile CDs with text files vs printouts

I really enjoy finding old imageboards that have been abandoned for years, sometimes decades.

A lot of them are on waybackmachine, but finding out about them is often the hard part.

I created a chan discussion board on my own imageboard (http://13channel.crabdance.com/chan/index.html) to research this kind of stuff - but only for chans specifically.

It would be really cool if this became a trend. I'm sure tons of people have printouts from back then.

It would be likely easiest to have it digitized first.

Either use an all in one printer or scanner with an automatic document feeder, or send that box to a service to scan.

Once digitized there are a lot more places interested in it

Did we have web forums back then? I know Usenet was a thing.

I remember printing out USENET posts on fan-fold perforated paper that had green and white stipes circa 1990. I think I got rid of all of them when I moved to Germany in 1999 and really pared down my possessions.

I should really look and see if I have anything interesting on my floppies that never made it to my hard disks. Unfortunately I think I have very little left from BBS forums. I definitely lost some things in hard disk crashes over the years with incomplete backups.

in various forms, sure.

the well has been around since the mid 80s. It was a bbs and then a few other weird things until it became a 'somewhat standard' web forum in the mid 90s -- but if I remember right when it transitioned from BBS there was an effort to move the conversations over to the web forum.

delphi forums too, which similar to the well has been through a few incarnations.

I have a few copy/paste text files from AOL forums from the 90s, of which sadly the other 99.99% was lost unless AOL (or the clients to whom they subcontracted maintenance of forums at individual keywords) still has them on a tape drive somewhere.

AOL has changed hands so many times since then. I highly doubt they have copies of much.

I grew up on AOL 2.5 and the hacking/warez scene there. So many good times with 1IM punters, cchats, scrolling, and phishing OH and INT accounts.

I would assume so! I remember playing on Battle.net with StarCraft back in 97 and that had messaging integrated it. It basically had its own little IRC going. 25 friend limit!

"Web" in the strict sense? Not really, as the "World Wide Web" wasn't invented until ~1990, and the protocol and software weren't made public until 1993[1]. So there weren't a lot of HTTP/HTML based "web" sites between 1991-1994, and probably even fewer "forum" type sites.

BUT... in a more colloquial sense of how "web" might be used retrospectively, as sort of a loose synonym for "online", then absolutely. Going back well into the 1980's, and then into the 1990's, we had all sorts of online services, including discussion forums. There were the big services like Compuserve, The Well, AOL, Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. And then there were individual small dial-up BBS's[2] by the bushel-load.

At their peak there were many thousands of them in the US alone. There were entire magazines printed and distributed that were effectively nothing but lists of dial-up numbers for BBS's, and magazines like Computer Shopper had big sections dedicated to listing those as well.

And then there was, as you mention, Usenet.

So yeah, even back in 1991, there were plenty of forums that might not have strictly been part of "the web", but that someone in contemporary times might casually describe as a "web forum".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

Probably not the right place for this but consider what happened to the truecrypt forums. Two custodian copies online is a good thing.

Related, I have a lot of IRC logs form 1997-2004. Is there somehow an IRC archive project?

Jason has posted elsewhere in this post, but textfiles.com is a safe bet for a future home for nearly any kind of log of that sort.

Just select the most significant stuff and digitize it yourself.

Definitely, Archive.org is the best bet.

Paging Jason Scott, @textfiles

Hi.

we got ourselves a stringer for the cic.

well, not quite. soon.

models gotta feed.

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