The EZBoards are back on the Wayback Machine!

[DJ Yoshiman]

@GeneralGuy @DJ Yoshiman @fireball3k @King Piranha Plant

I know I'm pretty late for this, but guess what? A few months ago, I figured out how the Wayback Machine Downloader works, and I've downloaded an entire backup of the MFGG ezboard! That includes the main page, forums, and the threads. I didn't bother with post forms (i.e. when you click Reply or something), however, although there's some sitting in my backup as I was trying to figure out the tool. I downloaded every captured version (at least before the forum went down in mid-2003). There doesn't seem to be any CSS files included nor are there images (though, I've also downloaded the images hosted on the MFGG Emulation Zone and TD's Geocities domain), but the forum's styling looks as it should and all the text is intact.

So, are we going to try to organize the backup into something resembling a read-only forum like http://archive.mfgg.net? Or should we just list all the topics that have been saved from oldest to newest, divided by forum, like, for example, in PCKF Archive? I think the latter would be simpler, even if it would stick out from the IPB and phpBB archives. Either way, a lot of work needs to get done if you want to the discussions to be user-friendly. For one, the links would have to be changed to point to either a Wayback Machine archive or in our hypothetical ezboard archive. I would also upload the images to our server and accordingly redirect the image links. We might have to remove the scripts/connections that seem to do nothing but greatly increase load times. It would also be nice if we could make it so that some of the discussions won't horizontally stretch out (supertoad2k has an awfully long user title).

Someday, I'd like to send my backups to @VinnyVideo, since I'm sure he'd like to have it. However, it's probably going to be through e-mail, unless I can find a good file host, even if it's temporary (I can't access my own FTP server). If we can agree on the direction of our ezboard archive, I might be willing to do some of the work needed to make it nice.

I'm still a big Yoshi's Island fan - it's definitely one of my favorite platformers. For a lot of MFGGers around that time, the original Super NES version of YI came out when they were in elementary school, so a lot of them played it when it was new, and it likely made a big impression on them. At the time, it was Nintendo's last high-profile Mario platformer. This choice of favorite Mario game is a bit ironic considering that MFGG has always had a shortage of YI fangames and ROM hacks, though!

Very good points! Yoshi's Island is also one of my favorite platformers, even if I haven't played it in a while. About that last point, though, I always thought MFGG had a lot of Yoshi fangames in its earlier years, many of which incorporated Yoshi's Island mechanics. I mean, by the end of 2003, we've had:

• Yoshi Gone MFGG
  
• Yoshi RPG: Secret Legends
  
• Crazee Dazee Shoot-Out Stand
  
• Yoshi's Island PC
  
• Yoshi vs. Windows
  
• Yoshi's Island X
  
• Yoshi's Island X2
  
• Yoshi Invasion
  
• Yoshi's Ghost Run
  
• Yoshi, Dead and Loving it!
  
• Klown Tag
  
• Yoshi vs Windows Platinum
  
• Mario and Yoshi
  
• Yoshi Deluxe
  
• Poochie
  
• Yoshi's Quest Gold
  
• Bidget Ball
  

And 8 of those have tongue-licking! Sure, none of them may have felt close to Yoshi's Island, but to be fair, not many fangames by that time period played like Super Mario Bros either. The list above doesn't even mention all those fangames that star Mario but heavily use Yoshi's Island graphics, such as the fantastic Mario's Mansion trilogy!

I'll close off this post with a pretty good image I found in the Geocities domain:

Sorry for the delay. Good to hear! I mean, EZBoard MFGG was cringy as all hell, but preservation is preservation, and I'm all here for it! Let us know how that goes, I'd like to see how much was actually archived. When I used to check the EZBoard URLs back when it was available on the Internet Archive, it showed up with only a sprinkling of pages of forums and a handful of topics that could actually be viewed. Let's see how it goes.