A few things:
The forums are being deleted soon. I don't know when— ask Will— but they're going to be gone forever. This isn't like the old forum, which you can still find but can't post to anymore. Once it's gone, it's gone.
For the most part.
If you have the time, you can go about saving the various subforums and threads to the Wayback Machine.
You can go to their webpage and hit "Save Page Now", but it takes a little while for the page to get saved.
You can also download a browser extension. Then you just have to go to that page, click on the extension and hit 'Save Page', and a new tab will come up. You can then immediately close that tab because Wayback Machine still saves the page (don't worry, I've checked!) and move on.
Once the new forums are up, you can get to work rebuilding everything there.
A few more things:
- Make sure to also archive the subforum pages. Don't just archive the threads and leave future visitors with no way to view them!
- It's best to slow down on posting new things to the forum unless you archive it immediately after doing so. Otherwise whatever you posted will be lost forever and your time wasted.
- It is wholly possible to archive the entire forum, but there are still thousands of threads and most of them are useless. Because of this, it's best to focus on getting the biggest/most important/most memorable first and then picking up the rest because this can get very tedious for threads that have dozens, even hundreds of pages.
- I'd recommend going from oldest to newest.
This should also be the place where we post how far along we've gotten in archiving the forum, so post your progress. This can also help to make sure we don't wind up archiving the same pages a few hours or minutes from each other without realizing it's already been done.
I've saved the entire Nanotechnology & Material Science news thread to the Wayback Machine as a test run to see if it works (barring the 36th page). I'm currently in the middle of archiving the Ukraine Conflict thread (up to page 52).
Edit: And the Ukraine Conflict thread is completely saved.
For those wondering why that was the first one I chose, well I mean I've said it many times before...