Apolyton Archive

[Solver]

Some of the people here may still remember that Apolyton was once upon a time a gaming site

I rebuilt and published a full archive of Apolyton as it was in 2005, or at least as full as possible. Thousands of threads are there with the 1998-2001 forum look, and the entire site and forums as of 2005 are there. The 2005 view of the forum has also been restored with thousands of posts that aren't available here in the live site's archives due to all the database breakage that the site has had. So this standalone archive is more complete than the live site's one, if you're looking at 2001 and earlier.

The various hosted Civ sites and Apolyton's main site (which had content once upon a time!) also restored and archived. Attachments and downloads that were hosted on Apolyton mostly work, and of course external links have been dead for many years.

The people who would find this most interesting are I think ironically not the ones still around, but it would still be weird not to post here! The visuals should give some of you a nostalgic reminder.

The archive, main page: https://apolytonarchive.net

More info about it: https://apolytonarchive.net/about-this-archive.html

The 2005 forum front page: https://2005.apolytonarchive.net/forums/

[The Mad Monk]

Great, I'll take a look!

[The Mad Monk]

First Impression: Off topic looks nice. The Apolyton logo is absolutely glaring in dark mode, I guess it copies my settings from Poly live?

Looking at the threads is making me nostalgic.

[Lorizael]

Very cool, Solver. That must have taken a lot of work.

[BeBMan]

Thanks!

[BeBMan]

People back then had all small......avatars!

[Solver]

Glad people are enjoying the memories!

It was quite an undertaking, would never be done without LLMs. I first looked into the feasibility of this around five years ago, and discovered that a fairly comprehensive rebuild would be possible but very laborious. There are many forums that changed IDs, links that changed where they go, database damage and all sorts of weird code hacks that we did on the forums in the 2001-2004 era. So restoring lost threads or attachments needed some serious cross-referencing of thousands of different records to figure things out, and then stripping code for ads, permission blockers and stuff. Not much original thinking required but lots of searching and housekeeping, and so with an LLM it went from weeks of mostly boring work to a couple days of having that work outsourced.

[The Mad Monk]

AI

[Lorizael]

Glad people are enjoying the memories!

It was quite an undertaking, would never be done without LLMs. I first looked into the feasibility of this around five years ago, and discovered that a fairly comprehensive rebuild would be possible but very laborious. There are many forums that changed IDs, links that changed where they go, database damage and all sorts of weird code hacks that we did on the forums in the 2001-2004 era. So restoring lost threads or attachments needed some serious cross-referencing of thousands of different records to figure things out, and then stripping code for ads, permission blockers and stuff. Not much original thinking required but lots of searching and housekeeping, and so with an LLM it went from weeks of mostly boring work to a couple days of having that work outsourced.

In that case, anything dumb I said in 2005 is actually a 2026 LLM hallucination.

[Solver]

Sorry, excuse denied, the actual posts remain unchanged

And yes, my least favorite part of the process was seeing some of my own posts from 2001, which make my 2005 posts seem brilliant.

[-Jrabbit]

Wow, many thanks, Solver. Well done, sir.