This is a question for the older players. Does anyone know if there exists an archive of the ShadowTK mailing list from its heyday back in the '90s? Bonus points if you can answer the same for ShadowRN and ShadowGM.

If anyone would have it, it'd be Mark Imbriaco (Neuron Basher). I'll ask, though I doubt it.

Ahhh, TK... I have fond memories.

As always, you rock sir!

Yeah, I have been roaming the old highways of seizure inducing archived Geocities pages, and making use of the wayback machine to try and find an archive. No luck yet, though I have many old links.

I was pointed here by Gurth, and Mark's name was mentioned so... Keeping my fingers crossed.

Nostalgia's great, isn't it?

It's funny. A couple nights ago I was reminiscing on Facebook and digging through some of my old web page files.

Anyway, talked to Mark. He has the original servers in his garage, but they haven't been turned on in years, so he has no idea if they would even still work. He thinks he has backups somewhere, but isn't sure where, but apparently we piqued his curiosity, so he's gonna look.

Thanks Bull! And pass along my thanks to Mark as well. Hopefully a bit of nostalgia can be payment enough.

I'm pretty sure I have that old data somewhere, I just have to find it. I know I have the old servers in my garage, so if nothing else I can probably yank the drives out of them and mount them. I'll see what I can find.

Thank you!

I have a ShadowTK archive (and really, ALL messages from ALL important Shadowrun mailing lists and forums from 1992 to early 2003) in a 1.3Gb database sitting on my home server.

Now, what format do you need them on?

Is my member number really lower than Bull? Wow, rockin'

Zip? XD

I don't know what the best way to transfer such a database. FTP maybe? Bittorrent?

Well, the person who is your avatar has been around a while.

The data is in an Access database. I could extract it with some queries or I could whip up a quick website to do searches on it (something I almost competed at dumpshock but never released)

I'm kinda curious as to who has the numbers lower than us, actually. Me, you, Dvix, Adam, Jestyr, Mark... Who else was here at the very beginning of Deep Resonance? I think Pistons and Spudman joined us a little while after we started up.

Were some of the lower members maybe SR character names we nabbed to prevent them from being used, maybe? Like Fastjack and Dunklezahn and the like?

Uhm. Whichever works better/faster?

hmmm...

I'm gonna guess....

some of these people.

of course, I could be wrong

Yeah, join date doesn't quite work. Dumpshock (under it's original name Deep Resonance) has been around since... 1999 or so? At some point we switched over software and imported the database, IIRC, so there are several hundred members with that join date because of that.

Hehe. Doing that also shows just how conflated DS's Membership numbers are. Page after page of members who "joined" in 2002, but have 0 posts.

(To be fair, all forums get like that unless the admin prune those members periodically. I know we never did).

Hm. An archive of these old mailing lists would indeed be interesting, Paolo.

Yeah, Gurth from the current ShadowRN mailing list is interested in the TK, RN, GM and plot ones if they still exist as an archive.

Pretty sure you nailed it with the initial crew. I would have been first since I installed the software, but we were all there right at the beginning.



We did reserve a few, but it also looks like some member numbers have been adjusted. Not really a big deal, we're all old timers at this point. Hard to believe it was 1992 when I created the first Shadowrun related web site and then Paolo came along and made a much better one not long thereafter. Ah, the good old days. We need a reunion tour.

Also, I found the old drive that the site ran on. It was an IDE drive, and I don't have a computer with an IDE interface anymore, so I had to order a USB to IDE adapter. Got that today and I was able to pull the raw original logs from 1992-1999 off of it.

The newer archives were running on a VMware ESX virtual machine and I'm pulling the VMDK files off of that drive right now to see if modern VMware can read them. Stay tuned!

Sweet, dude, you're awesome!

Well, Shadowrun is from 1989, so you were there right at the start. I still have one of the first BBB in Ottawa. I wonder how dated SR1 is...

Yup, I have an original hardcover SR1 on the bookshelf upstairs.

So, good news! All the archives from 1992-2007 are now available and shared in a single ~400MB zip file that will expand to around 1.3GB when you unzip it. There are various formats and some amount of duplication where messages exist both as HTML and as mbox files, but all the content should be there.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/togu0ymqwz37c5x/archives.zip?dl=0

Hope everyone enjoys the trip down memory lane!

Remember, never trust an elf and never deal with a dragon.

Sweet, thank you

Oh jesus.

Thank you, Mark!

This will be an interesting read.

Logged in just to say thank you for this epic piece of nostalgia.

Edit: My virus scanner came up with a few hits (Mostly I-Worm/Netsky) as I was unzipping this. Can anyone else confirm or deny the virii?

I was an initial hanger on, rather than initial crew. That counts for something right?

I miss #shadowun

Thanks dude, you rock.

I can confirm your diagnosis I-Worm/Netsky.

I'm not surprised to see some old viruses in there. The archives that you see are the raw email logs from the list, which is going to be a straight copy of the incoming email. As long as you don't extract those attachments there shouldn't be any way for you to be infected, though I'd refrain from opening those files in anything beyond a text editor.

Looks like I'm playing Bug Hunter in a VM this weekend. You should probably update the post with the DL link just to be safe.

Soooo... Y2K part II ?

Just teasing..

am going to try and download/read these over the easter break when hopefully I get some free time

Gurth, of the current ShadowRN mailing list, was unconcerned about the virus warnings, he said he believes them to be false positives. But always good to be careful.

He has parsed the mailing list archives into readable HTML pages: http://shadowrn.understairs.nl/logs.php

Once more I'd like to thank everyone for their hand in this. What was lost has now been rescued from jaws of time.

And thus we release an old forgotten supervirus that brings about the fall of the internet!

Must not download... Just think of the shear number of carp (and no I did not misspell crap) in that zip file!


- Czar Eggbert

And thus the Crash of 2015...


-Czar Eggbert

Talk about nostalgia... there's some good stuff in there (some of it even mine...)

Mark, many thanks for finding and sharing that.

--
Paul J. Adam
Cassandra Defence Consulting

This is one of the great sadnesses: to have much knowledge, and little power.

Finally got around to catching up on my plethora of open tabs and grabbed this archive. Yep. There goes my productivity. That aside, many thanks for sharing!

Having a full download will certainly be better, but anyway: Archive Link