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Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Mon May 25, 2026 11:51 pm
by Pepe
Our forum veterans might sigh with nostalgia when they see this logo.

Image

Almost six years ago, the owner of the first version of our beloved forum - registered here as "formerly_bossarea" - sent me the backup of the old forum, from the state of April 11, 2010. It was a real hassle to get it running locally via IIS and for years I have tried finding the time to make it available for the public.

For a full month I have been working daily to use the tool WinHTTrack to do a complete mirror of the forum backup. It was a tedious task, as the extensive crawling repeatedly caused the local server to freeze. But I kept trying - and now I can proudly present the nearly complete archive, which you can find here:

👉 https://pepemusic.de/bossarea_forum_archive/index.html 👈

As you can see in the Wayback Machine, posts from 17 months are missing from the forum backup. Everything from after April 2010 can be found only in fragments in the Wayback Machine. But the mirrored forum contains posts from five full years!

A few important notes on using the forum archive!
  • You cannot use the dropdown menus to navigate through the pages of the threads or forums. The threads have "Previous Page | Next Page" text links, but the forums have not. If you navigate to a forum section, for example "Boss Compact Pedals", only the first page is instantly accessible. That is why I had to create the list of available sites. Use the index page to jump to the desired forum page.
  • The custom Google search is not yet ready, but once it has crawled all the html-files you will have the possibility to find some missing thread pages, or you can search for keywords.
  • Some of the topic pages were not successfully captured by the program. I have created screenshots of those pages (those are marked in the index.html). As soon as the Google search starts working, you can search for the topic titles shown in the pictures - or if you have the zip-file of the whole forum mirror, you can do it in the file browser of your operating system.
  • Some threads have missing pages, or some of the links are faulty. To browse through a long topic, like "Let's see your pedal board #3" (shown below), it is recommended to open the single pages in the forum overview.
Image

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 6:34 am
by The_Doc
I’ve just dipped into this and enjoying what I see - lots of great memories and loads of information ! Huge thanks for doing this Pepe.

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 6:51 am
by Pepe
For anyone interested, I can send the large data package of 10,022 files (560 MB) via WeTransfer.

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 10:54 am
by laurie
Spectacular pepe! I went down the hole for half an hour, and just scratched the surface. Thank you!

Nearly 20 years ago... wow.

I'll definitely take the file transfer - with thanks!

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 11:27 am
by Pepe
I will send it to you. The benefit of having it on your hard disk (over 1.2 GB unzipped) is that you can do an online search with any keywords. For example "Slow Gear" in quotation marks lists up all the threads and pictures with exactly this word combination.

laurie wrote: ↑
Tue May 26, 2026 10:54 am
Nearly 20 years ago... wow.
Even 21 years! In June 2005 Goran asked, in one of the very first threads, about finding a way for dating BOSS pedals by the serial number:

Screenshot Bossarea Forum - The Big Question - Dating by serial.png
Screenshot Bossarea Forum - The Big Question - Dating by serial.png (59.8 KiB) Viewed 2615 times

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 11:57 am
by BearBoy
Wow. Just went down a bit of rabbit hole with that :lol: So many familiar old contributors who don't appear to have made it as far as here.

Thanks for taking the time to pull all that together Pepe!

I'm not sure when I joined the original forum. I found myself in some pages from 2011 on the Wayback Machine.

Does anyone know the rough dates of our three homes?

BossArea: the forum rules seem to have been posted on the 2nd of June 2005 - ??????
StompBoxZone: earliest post ("skugga's test topic") I can find was posted on the 25th of November 2011 - last post on 28th of December 2019
BossAreaForum: 15th of August 2018 - Now

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Tue May 26, 2026 4:41 pm
by Zerksies
The old boss site feels like home

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Sun May 31, 2026 12:34 pm
by fernieite
Thanks Pepe! That was a labour of love. :!:
Hats off to you, man!

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2026 6:58 am
by fuzzbuzzfuzz
Pepe wrote: ↑
Mon May 25, 2026 11:51 pm
Our forum veterans might sigh with nostalgia when they see this logo.

Image

Almost six years ago, the owner of the first version of our beloved forum - registered here as "formerly_bossarea" - sent me the backup of the old forum, from the state of April 11, 2010. It was a real hassle to get it running locally via IIS and for years I have tried finding the time to make it available for the public.

For a full month I have been working daily to use the tool WinHTTrack to do a complete mirror of the forum backup. It was a tedious task, as the extensive crawling repeatedly caused the local server to freeze. But I kept trying - and now I can proudly present the nearly complete archive, which you can find here:

👉 https://pepemusic.de/bossarea_forum_archive/index.html 👈

As you can see in the Wayback Machine, posts from 17 months are missing from the forum backup. Everything from after April 2010 can be found only in fragments in the Wayback Machine. But the mirrored forum contains posts from five full years!

A few important notes on using the forum archive!
  • You cannot use the dropdown menus to navigate through the pages of the threads or forums. The threads have "Previous Page | Next Page" text links, but the forums have not. If you navigate to a forum section, for example "Boss Compact Pedals", only the first page is instantly accessible. That is why I had to create the list of available sites. Use the index page to jump to the desired forum page.
  • The custom Google search is not yet ready, but once it has crawled all the html-files you will have the possibility to find some missing thread pages, or you can search for keywords.
  • Some of the topic pages were not successfully captured by the program. I have created screenshots of those pages (those are marked in the index.html). As soon as the Google search starts working, you can search for the topic titles shown in the pictures - or if you have the zip-file of the whole forum mirror, you can do it in the file browser of your operating system.
  • Some threads have missing pages, or some of the links are faulty. To browse through a long topic, like "Let's see your pedal board #3" (shown below), it is recommended to open the single pages in the forum overview.
Image
Good golly, Pepe, what a fabulous effort. Thank you!

Re: Bossarea Forum Archive

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2026 4:49 am
by bigtone23
How very cool and a consuming, laborious task!
Thank you for doing this. I wasn't a member of Bossarea, but did lurk the site quite a few times when going down rabbit holes.
Visiting the archive brought back many memories.