Totse Recovery Project

[taipan_enigma]

This started as a project to rebuild totse from whatever survived - Wayback Machine snapshots, old UBB-era captures, forum listing pages, a few things people sent in directly. We've made real progress, but we're closing in on the limit of what's publicly archived anywhere. From here, the biggest gains are going to come from people who were actually here.

https://totse.dev

This is the result of my efforts. It has a working "hot topics" section, which just rotates real forum posts.

Every known advertisement that was worthwhile rotates on page refresh.

There is one forum that is 100% salvaged in it's entirety which is My God Can Beat The Shit Out Of Your God. This forum contains every post, every thread ever created to the best of my knowledge. At least, back to 2000. There are a couple that never got converted from UBB to vBulletin in the past, so they were lost long before.

Overall forum recovery is around only 3% while 64% are some form of recovery. There are partial posts, and partial threads that were found using saved search results pages, which only provided excerpts in many cases.

I also compiled a page of "legendary threads". I am still working on getting these compiled and sorted. Threads with 100+ responses and recovered are listed on the page.

If you saved a thread, took a screenshot, printed something out, or just remember a post well enough to retype it - it's worth sending. Even a fragment helps: a lot of what's listed below only survives as a title and a reply count, and any real content that fills one of those in is a thread we'd otherwise never get back.

enigma@totse.dev <-- my email

 

[Arnox]

Unfortunately, I didn't start engaging with TOTSE until very late in the site's lifecycle. And when I did make an account and join, it was on TOTSE2, not the original, which, I sadly also don't have an archive for. >_> My contribution was making the replacement site for the replacement site. lol Also, sadly, to my knowledge, there are no TOTSE veterans here on Sanctuary. Our numbers are pretty sparse in general which is due to a combination of factors, but basically, it's because we don't know if it's really a good idea to advertise this site in this day and age of rampant fourth-amendment violations and general authoritarianism. And I was always kinda shit at advertising as well.

We have been in operation for a pretty damn long time though, and there is a wealth of information and discussion on this forum (plus Sanctuary v1.0) for all kinds of subjects. I am actually pretty proud of the information that is contained here and I continue to update it frequently with new findings, questions, and discussions at least semi-regularly. The OG TOTSE was a wealth of information. I am glad someone is restoring it as best as they can, even it's only 1/20th of what it was at this time.

All that being said, I will also say this. When I was first starting Sanctuary out, and was somewhat into its lifecycle, I made the mistake of clinging to TOTSE and the past, but I advise heavily that you do not do so. As much as we need TOTSE to exist nowadays, those days of its happy operation are long gone and its old members scattered to the winds. I have tried contacting Jeff Hunter via email for help even, but he has also long since departed this scene, very probably for good.

I have a lot more thoughts on this actually but I think I'll leave it here and wait for your response first.

 

[taipan_enigma]

Unfortunately, I didn't start engaging with TOTSE until very late in the site's lifecycle. And when I did make an account and join, it was on TOTSE2, not the original, which, I sadly also don't have an archive for. >_> My contribution was making the replacement site for the replacement site. lol Also, sadly, to my knowledge, there are no TOTSE veterans here on Sanctuary. Our numbers are pretty sparse in general which is due to a combination of factors, but basically, it's because we don't know if it's really a good idea to advertise this site in this day and age of rampant fourth-amendment violations and general authoritarianism. And I was always kinda shit at advertising as well.

We have been in operation for a pretty damn long time though, and there is a wealth of information and discussion on this forum (plus Sanctuary v1.0) for all kinds of subjects. I am actually pretty proud of the information that is contained here and I continue to update it frequently with new findings, questions, and discussions at least semi-regularly. The OG TOTSE was a wealth of information. I am glad someone is restoring it as best as they can, even it's only 1/20th of what it was at this time.

All that being said, I will also say this. When I was first starting Sanctuary out, and was somewhat into its lifecycle, I made the mistake of clinging to TOTSE and the past, but I advise heavily that you do not do so. As much as we need TOTSE to exist nowadays, those days of its happy operation are long gone and its old members scattered to the winds. I have tried contacting Jeff Hunter via email for help even, but he has also long since departed this scene, very probably for good.

I have a lot more thoughts on this actually but I think I'll leave it here and wait for your response first.

I was a member early in the days of totse. I have had direct contact with Jeff several times, as well as several others from NirvanaNET and future iterations. Dr. Strangelove, acidmelt, Zok.

My goal is not to cling to totse, but rather that it is a preservation. Not too dissimilar from what archive.org does. No one has really preserved the real content of totse, which is the forum posts. The text files are largely archived, and were never original anyway. Jeff used to just scour various BBS's where they had articles and essentially archived them in his own way.

The forum posts were the heart of the webpage, and some legendary threads existed that I think should be archived. This is a project of mine, not an obsession, although the two often overlap. I do not plan to stop this goal until we are 100% recovered. It may never happen, and that is okay as well.

This BBS and later forum, was a big part of my development growing up, and I just want to see it's content preserved, if for nothing else other than my own amusement.

 

[Arnox]

I was a member early in the days of totse. I have had direct contact with Jeff several times, as well as several others from NirvanaNET and future iterations. Dr. Strangelove, acidmelt, Zok.

My goal is not to cling to totse, but rather that it is a preservation. Not too dissimilar from what archive.org does. No one has really preserved the real content of totse, which is the forum posts. The text files are largely archived, and were never original anyway. Jeff used to just scour various BBS's where they had articles and essentially archived them in his own way.

The forum posts were the heart of the webpage, and some legendary threads existed that I think should be archived. This is a project of mine, not an obsession, although the two often overlap. I do not plan to stop this goal until we are 100% recovered. It may never happen, and that is okay as well.

This BBS and later forum, was a big part of my development growing up, and I just want to see it's content preserved, if for nothing else other than my own amusement.

I fully understand and wish you all the luck in this endeavor. <3

So, is there anything I can do for you, then, regarding this site, beyond giving any backups I have? Have you talked to anyone from niggasin.space? If you haven't talked to them yet, I would warn you of all the drama I had with them in the past, but it's been so long ago now that I wonder if any of it is even relevant anymore.

By the way, I think I did have an archive of old-ass pictures of TOTSE and Zoklet members and meetups.

 

[taipan_enigma]

I fully understand and wish you all the luck in this endeavor. <3

So, is there anything I can do for you, then, regarding this site, beyond giving any backups I have? Have you talked to anyone from niggasin.space? If you haven't talked to them yet, I would warn you of all the drama I had with them in the past, but it's been so long ago now that I wonder if any of it is even relevant anymore.

By the way, I think I did have an archive of old-ass pictures of TOTSE and Zoklet members and meetups.

I went through the archives you have uploaded on this page. They match the archive.org pages. Helpful double check, though.

Fortunately, we have a TON of the thread titles, so at least the majority of that data is salvaged, even if little of the content is. For some reason I was able to find a lot of saved search pages, and so collected excerpts of real posts, which is helpful in tying stray screenshots and such together.

Anything you have that may have been posted on the forums, or any additional archives are helpful. Even if they're dirty and messy. At one time SomethingAwful and totse got into a flame war, and SomethingAwful posted a lot of screenshots of threads, which allowed me to recover a nice little chunk of a pretty decently long thread.

Same for the HTS-Noob highlighter post, the bulk from HTS-Noob directly was salvaged through screenshots.

Images of real content from totse, is helpful. Even if someone can remember a thread or post really well, it'll be marked as such and added in.

 

[Arnox]

I went through the archives you have uploaded on this page. They match the archive.org pages. Helpful double check, though.

Fortunately, we have a TON of the thread titles, so at least the majority of that data is salvaged, even if little of the content is. For some reason I was able to find a lot of saved search pages, and so collected excerpts of real posts, which is helpful in tying stray screenshots and such together.

Anything you have that may have been posted on the forums, or any additional archives are helpful. Even if they're dirty and messy. At one time SomethingAwful and totse got into a flame war, and SomethingAwful posted a lot of screenshots of threads, which allowed me to recover a nice little chunk of a pretty decently long thread.

Same for the HTS-Noob highlighter post, the bulk from HTS-Noob directly was salvaged through screenshots.

Images of real content from totse, is helpful. Even if someone can remember a thread or post really well, it'll be marked as such and added in.

Apparently, that archive I had is the exact same as what was already uploaded. My bad. I apologize. lol

I guess the last question I have is, do you want to link to us somewhere on the page, or do you plan to sideload up an active forum of your own as well to supplement the TOTSE archive, or do you just want to have the archive be there and nothing more?

 

[taipan_enigma]

Apparently, that archive I had is the exact same as what was already uploaded. My bad. I apologize. lol

I guess the last question I have is, do you want to link to us somewhere on the page, or do you plan to sideload up an active forum of your own as well to supplement the TOTSE archive, or do you just want to have the archive be there and nothing more?

I don't plan to operate my own forums or anything. I just want to put together as much of an archive as I can. Any active communities related I can potentially link to to promote discussion if the page ends up getting any traffic.

 

[Arnox]

I don't plan to operate my own forums or anything. I just want to put together as much of an archive as I can. Any active communities related I can potentially link to to promote discussion if the page ends up getting any traffic.

Roger that. Well good luck in your endeavors.