Khalid founded this forum in November 2006 so that supporters of Al-Qadsiah could argue about their club somewhere the official site would not moderate them. It ran until 2013. The Internet Archive holds one front page from 2009 and eleven files of its skin — nothing else from that year.
What survives instead came out of his own browser cache, kept for seventeen years: eleven complete pages from a single morning, 17 May 2009. Every post, every signature, every timestamp.
Open the forum — 17 May 2009 the header Flash runs again; the threads open; the adverts are named where they stoodOr go straight to a page: the front page · the forum listing · a thread.
Three sources, and which part is which
So the colours are not chosen and the layout is not guessed: the deep red #7E050C, the cream #F8E897, the orange headings #CE7A28 are read out of the file the server sent. And the Flash in the header runs — the real 185 KB movie, played by Ruffle, in the same 230×234 box.
What you can open
| page | the forum's own title | |
|---|---|---|
| forum-front.htm | الصفحة الرئيسية | the forum front page |
| forumdisplay.htm | المنتديات القدساوية | the forum listing |
| thread-sahlawi.htm | تضحية السهلاوي تحتاج للتكريم | by قدساوي ياقدساوي — reposted from الميدان الرياضي |
| thread-hazza.htm | الحرب المنتظرة ضد الهزاع وادارته | the fight with the board |
| thread-hazza-2.htm | الحرب المنتظرة ضد الهزاع وادارته | a later page of the same thread |
| thread-jadwal.htm | جدول الدوري واستراتجية مواجهات دوري المحترفيين | |
| thread-hilaliyah.htm | اسماء هلاليــــــــــه مطروحه للانتقال والاعـــــــــارة | |
| online.htm | المتواجدون الآن | who was on the forum that morning |
| newthread.htm | إنشاء موضوع جديد | the posting form |
The main site, article by article
qadsiyah.com itself ran PHP-Nuke, not vBulletin, and thirty-nine of its news articles are archived. Its RSS feed of February 2010 gave up ten of them complete — 17,732 characters — and the first has been rebuilt with its photographs:
| article | title | photographs |
|---|---|---|
| sid=34 | حفل تكريم عبدالله جمعة | 65 named · 36 back in place · 29 identified in the gallery |
| sid=36 | صور من مباراة الفتح - القادسية | 20 named · 11 back in place · 9 identified in the gallery |
sid=36 is worth reading rather than skimming. It opens «هذه المرة سأطرح الموضوع بدون تقرير عن المباراة لأني لم احلل اللقاء فنيا بل كنت على اعصابي طوال اللقاء» — no match report, because he was too on edge to analyse anything — and then tells you about the two coaches that left Khobar at half past three, the man at the club who told him not to bother going because they would lose, and the police patrol that stopped them on the road and wrote them a ticket. It is a supporter's account of a journey, not journalism, and it is the kind of thing nobody thinks to archive.
What the archive could not have saved
The site's robots.txt of February 2007 forbade every crawler from /images/ and /themes/, and the Internet Archive obeyed robots rules on historic crawls. A great deal of this site was never savable. Of the eight adverts in that row, exactly one survives — and it is the one reading «مساحة إعلانية», advertising space, the box nobody bought.
Everything altered is listed on the reconstruction's own about page.