So I got a little sidetracked
I thought to myself how good it would be to have the old forum back again!
So here we are three weeks later after a lot of head-scratching, swearing, and coffee's, we have here a working version of the forum. I was successfully able to convert and migrate all the data from an old Invision Power Board platform to a fresh installation of PHPbb, which was a serious challenge. The new forum is almost exactly like it was back in 2006 to 2017. It's all there, every thread, post and user. There are still some minor things to sort out, but for now its good to go.
For users with an existing S12Silvia.com account...
Encrypted password data from the original forum was unable to be migrated over to the new board, so to access your old account you will need to do a password recovery. Click the 'Login' link in the top right corner, then click 'I forgot my password'. You will need to enter the email address associated with your old S12Silvia account to receive the recovery email. If you are unsure of what this email account is, or no longer have access to this email account, drop me a PM and I'll help you gain access to your old account.
If your old S12Silvia.com user name has anything other than alphanumeric characters in it, such as an apostrophe or exclamation mark, you will need to message me to have this fixed. You will not be able to log in or do a recover password as PHPbb does not handle non-alphanumeric characters in the user name and will throw an error at you. I can change your details manually to get you access to the forum.
New users...
New users should be able to register a new account and use the forum as normal. Use the register link in the top right corner of the forum. Fill in your details and confirm registration through the email you will be sent.
The S12Silvia.com Blog...
The official S12Silvia.com Blog ran from 2009 to 2016. I have managed to recover all the old blogs and these have been filed in the Blog topic on the forum. There is a load of old content from the old blog to browse through including feature cars, event coverage, driver profiles, and much more!
Forum content...
Any image that was uploaded to S12Silvia.com and hosted through the forum server has also been recovered and will display properly in any related thread or post. There will be a lot of broken images due to photos being hosted on third-party websites such as Photobucket etc. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do to recover these images.
Some links between threads/posts may not work, I'm still figuring out how to go about fixing this as it's more complicated. There may be some small issues along the way, and if you come across anything please be sure to let me know about it.
And finally...
For many of us who have lived the S12 life for a very long time, the forums were a huge part of our lives. There was no social media, no Facebook groups to easily contact others and ask questions, everything was done through Internet forums. I really hope you enjoy reading through the old S12Silvia.com forum, find and update your old build thread, search for a how-to, or just get nostalgic and browse to your hearts content!
Thanks for many years of S12 love.
Matt.
