I was just checking my spam and seen an email for “teh forum”. Well there’s a blast from the past. I hope everyone is doing well.

Anyone remember the URL? I wonder if Waybackmachine ever crawled it, would be amusing to look through that again.

Anywho, I'm still kicking around. Turned 40 last month, still married and living in Scotland for over 10 years now (North of Aberdeen). Work wise, I'm a Service Manager for an IT company these days.

The earliest mention on this version of teh which suggests the Bestiary was available is back in 2006 30205.25 but it looks like it was lost in a server move. Kenny downloaded it but then lost what he downloaded. JonCooper checked the wayback thingummy in 2012 and found a link dated Feb 15 2006, but not a copy of the actual data :( 

Happy Birthday for last month. 

I found msg:12047.1 from Jan 2004 where it got moved to http://tehforum.co.uk/bestiary/index.php due to Izziwizzi's hosting breaking - previously it was http://www.thenetfish.com/xeno/bestiary/ and http://www.thenetfish.com/xeno/bestiary/index_flash.php and temporarily http://rowan.no-ip.org/bestiary/

There's also msg:25886.2 in Jul 2005 which identifies http://www.tehforum.co.uk/bestiary/index_flash.php and later on msg:25886.81 from August 2005 where another server issue resulted in a 2003 version getting uploaded to https://www.tehforum.co.uk/bestiary/index.php and a month later msg:27222.12 says it was at https://www.tehforum.co.uk/~bestiary/index.php

Oh and back in Jun 2003 msg:6658.1 says it was previously http://www.bestiary.tk/

I would check all those on Wayback Machine, but my ISP is currently flagging archive.org IPs as "adult" and forgetting that I disabled all crappy filtering previously, so I'll try later.

Even if it's not on WM, I will live in eternal hope of the small chance that someone realizes they either downloaded http://rowan.no-ip.org/bestiary/best.zip or perhaps have bestiary.xml in a browser cache on an old hard drive or something.

Hmm, not looking too hopeful. A couple of those pages were crawled, but are missing the data. I was able to find some headers, such as:

    <meta name="description" content="The NPCFF bestiary. Everything from an explanation of 1337 to Yvonne.">
    <meta name="keywords" content="PCFormat, Bestiary, NPCF, PCF, Not PCFormat Forum, NPCFF">

Unfortunately, no data. Every time I've tried to grab the flash file or whatever, I'm told it wasn't grabbed. I do have an old PC in the cupboard, maybe at some point I'll try resurrecting it to see if there's anything there, wouldn't get your hopes up though. I don't have a copy of the zip file anyway.

The other option is to go find Rowan, kidnap him, and not let him go until he recreates it...

Crikey how long ago was this thing! I was only 18 in 2004

Hah! Time passes. Next stop 40.

If it's any consolation, I was only 48 in 2004. I noticed Menace as I was poking about in those posts and he was in his 50s.

I don't remember, but would guess late 2002 - the welcome thread for this place is Jan 2003, and there are casual mentions to it just a couple of weeks in, but "just go to teh forum bestiary, there are notes about a lot of people there already" suggests that it's not too old.

If only we had a satirical chronicle to help us catalogue such things. :C

Hello

Hello Ant. 

Ay-up!

Yes

I love how many people clearly poke their head in fairly often - just on the off chance the web has reverted 20 years.

 

it's nice to see if someone's posted something, or a rare flyby from a past face, for sure.

https://www.softwire.com/softwire-team/rowan-hill/

Here's Rowan. Make it happen.

What are you up to nowadays, Mr M?

Mostly training people to be doctors, along with a bit of research. And being a dad - that takes a fair bit of time. Hope all is well with you. 

Whoa, buried the lede there a little bit unless I missed it before! Congrats - just the one?

Still lecturing I assume? Was it a Doctorate that you were doing when you came over to talk about organ donations?

Lifes good here - also dadding and all that! I've been an IT Contractor / Freelance consultant since 2013