I've been working on getting your old forum into a more useful state.
It took DAYS for all the files to download.
Fortunately that was just a set-and-forget process, so you won't be charged for days of work. Now that I have a local copy of all the files, I can see that there's quite a lot of duplication - several mostly identical files for each page from the forum. I think that would have happened because the old forum software assigned a session ID to each user, and it put the session ID into the URLs, and the session ID seems to have changed over time, so I think the scraping software you used to pull down all the files was tricked into downloading the same file multiple times, simply because the URL had a different ID in it. I'm developing a small script that will automatically detect and remove duplicated pages, which will make the archive easier to search through.
I won't be able to import all the old forum posts into the new forum; I think it would take many hours to arrange for that to happen. What I can do (fairly soon I think) is upload a duplicate-free set of forum pages, with one or more unique index pages linking them together (probably - I still need to work out how to get duplicate-free index pages). That will make them easy to browse, and from there it shouldn't be too hard to get a search engine working for them.
Alice
