I noticed the top threads aren't displayed anymore.

But with all the hot stuff coming from the 3D models that I've been eager to get my virtual hands on, I came prepared!  For crying out loud, let a graveyard be a standalone battleground!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/308654289109123072/483720737488764948/Screen_Shot_2018-08-27_at_2.21.26_PM.png

No idea. Can't find that thread otherwise I'd sticky it, but it may have been deleted by accident.

It looks as if all the stickied posts of the past are gone, in fact.
Not sure when exactly that happened.

A few weeks ago, DJ Normality (aka The Hacker, 000001, Sharp, etc...) renamed his original account to "FuckTwistedMetal" and flooded the forum with hundreds of spam messages. Magnum was the first admin to come across the spam, so he banned DJ and cleaned it all up. But in the process he accidentally deleted more than just the spam. Stickied threads got caught in the crossfire.

Cleaning up that much spam in one shot must've been kind of stressful and error-prone - especially if it was early in the morning or really late at night. Given the circumstances, Magnum tried to help as best he could and cleaned up the spam so quickly that most users never even saw it.

Unfortunately, what was accidentally deleted can't be easily recovered. Some of the deleted content can still be found on web caching sites such as the Wayback Machine. More might exist in recent forum backups. Although I doubt extracting the deleted content out of the backups and bringing them back into the active forum environment would be very practical...

Can't be recovered. the feature to do that was not turned on from the sites admin page.

So yea. That was it in a nutshell.

Just to give more context, what Magnum is referring to is YaBB's recycle bin feature. It didn't used to be enabled in the TMA forum. So in the past (prior to early/mid-July), mods/admins/webmasters could only delete threads outright.

The recycle bin feature was turned on almost immediately after what happened. So from now on, deleting threads will cause them to be initially sent into a recycle bin "ghost" board. That should reduce the risk of accidental thread deletions. Anything that gets accidentally recycled can be easily restored from there.

However:

• It's still possible to delete recycled threads. Now it's just a 2 step process (recycling, then deleting). But anyone who takes that second step would likely be doing it intentionally and be aware of what that entails.
  
• Deleting individual posts will still outright delete them. They won't be initially recycled. The only way to recycle a post is to split it into a separate thread, then recycle it.

What I was referring to at the end of my previous post was that if full-blown forum data backups are regularly being created, they might contain more recent versions of the deleted stickied-threads than the Wayback Machine. But if they exist, it would likely be a painful process to manually-extract them from a data backup and bring them back into the active forum environment.

Correct. It's not anyone's fault for it not being turned on. Hell, I had no idea that was even an option. The thing about it is that was a unique situation that none of us as Admins would've expected to do.

I do know at one point the spam here was really bad but, it had different topics listed. The shit he pulled was almost 2 pages of the same crap, and since it was easier in my mind to "delete all selected" I didn't realize that it also included the Sticky posts too. The solid line that kept them "separate" on the page does not keep it safe from delete all obviously.

Even if I was fully awake at the time, it still could've happened. Even to another Admin cause it's just so easy to do.

I see now why i cant find my fan fiction TM thread, guess i got hit as well.
Its okay since i never finished it anyways  ;D

Looks like some normal non-stickied threads were affected too :(. But all hope isn't lost...

The Wayback Machine's snapshot of the Fanfiction board contains a link to your "My Twisted Metal cast." thread. But unfortunately, it lacks a snapshot of the thread itself.

But since that provided enough information to at least know the thread's name and its original URL (http://temp.tmalliance.com/?num=1490864604), I tried searching other dedicated web archiving sites for it... None of them had it. Google found a result for it and a small excerpt of its content, but didn't have a cached version.

Tried repeating the same search on Bing and it came up with a result... including a cached version of it :)!

If you want to resume from where you left off, feel free to recreate the thread :). Btw I'd recommend trying to combine separate posts from the original thread into the new thread's OP (unless you run out of characters).

Maybe Bing could be a viable alternative to Google for finding recent caches of deleted threads. Although I'm not sure for how long Bing's results/caches will last for...


Edit:
Fixed the following link's destination:
Wayback Machine's snapshot of the Fanfiction board

Not sure if i will get back to it since but we will see. Was thinking on doing another thing, always related to fan fiction. Maybe after that  :-X