About this reconstruction

This is منتدى الجمهور القدساوي, the Al-Qadsiah supporters' forum at qadsiyah.com/vb, as it stood on 17 May 2009. It is assembled from three sources, and it is worth knowing which part came from where.

The pages — from a browser cache

Eleven pages: the front page, a forum listing, five threads, the new-thread form and the who-is-online page, twice. They are not from the Internet Archive. They came out of Khalid's own Internet Explorer cache, and they are complete — 55 to 148 KB each, every post, every signature, every date. The archive holds nothing from 2009 but a single front page.

The design — from the pages themselves

vBulletin wrote its stylesheet into the head of every page it served, so the cache kept it: 6,090 characters of the forum's own CSS. The deep red #7E050C, the cream #F8E897, the orange headings #CE7A28 — none of that is a choice made here. It is the file.

The pictures — from the style folder

321 files of the qadsiyah-2 style, kept by its owner: the header, the buttons, the post icons, the smilies, the gradients. And qm.swf, the 185 KB Flash movie that turned over in the header. Flash is gone from every browser, so Ruffle plays it — the same file, the same 230×234 box.

What was changed, and only this

• The pages were re-encoded from windows-1256 to UTF-8. Not a character changed, only how they are spelt in bytes — a server's own charset header overrides the tag inside a page, and without this every Arabic letter arrives broken.
• The adverts are marked, not shown. Eight pictures sat in that row and six of them lived on other people's servers — an Al-Nassr forum, two Arabic image hosts, a Google Pages banner. Every one is dead. Each is replaced by a box naming the host it came from, because the host is the surviving evidence. The one exception is real: musaab.k.googlepages.com/awt_150_50.gif is the only advert the Internet Archive kept, from 17 November 2007, and of all of them it is the one that says «مساحة إعلانية» — advertising space.
• Three pictures on qadsiyah.com's own root — logo.gif, ryan.jpg, mob.gif — are named where they stood. The site's robots.txt of 2007 forbade crawlers from /images/ and /themes/, and the archive obeyed, so a good deal of this site was never savable.
• Members' avatars are not here. They were uploads, never archived, and they are other people's faces.
• Links between the eleven pages we DO hold now open them: a forum name on the front page opens the listing, a thread title opens the thread, and the second page of the long thread opens too — 130 links in all. Every link to a page we do not hold leads to a notice saying so.
  
  Two departures from the archived markup, both deliberate. The header. It was drawn for a 1024-wide screen; on a wide monitor the crest and the Flash drifted into the middle together. The crest is now centred and the Flash pinned to the left end-cap, mirroring the 227px crowd photograph on the right. Nothing was added or removed — two table cells were given an alignment. The filename. The front page is served as forum-front.htm, not index.htm: something between the browser and the host would not open that name, while every other page in the folder opened. A copy also sits at index.html so the bare folder address works. The links were real; the server behind them is not.

One thing to notice rather than fix: the welcome line greets قدساوي الكورنيش. These pages were cached while somebody was logged in, so the forum is showing you their session, not yours. That is what a cache is.

← into the forum · the story of the recovery