Old forum, Old stories

Now I may have gotten this wrong but I keep coming across 1) references to an old Nifflas board that crashed?/was closed? and 2) Knytt Stories that were posted that were lost when the board was closed. Can someone explain it to me? What happened to the forum? What was different from this one? Are there stories that were permanently lost? Or are they all on the Archive?

I'd also like to better understand what the plans for the archive are but I guess I can ask that elsewhere; I'm mostly curious about the recent history of this place and the games on it, or no longer on it -- especially since I'm trying to play through as many delicious levels as possible.

Originally the Forum was on Nifflas's website: it was moved to the current host before the release of Saira to avoid service problems. Since then, the Forum underwent some small modifications in structure and rules. The old Forum remained accessible (but no new posts were allowed) for a while, then it was closed (access allowed only for administration purposes).

In the old Forum, you could attach KS levels directly to level topics, provided the level was smaller than 500KB; larger levels were uploaded to other sites, mostly file hosting sites. The Knyttlevels archive was created before the move to the current Forum, I believe, but many levels remained as topic attachments, and since some authors abandoned the Forum before the move, their levels are now either inaccessible or the file hosting site they used for them removed them. Therefore, a lot of levels were 'lost' this way.

While a number of levels were rehosted on Knyttlevels, there are probably many which are only found in some users' personal collection (myself included); we've agreed that there's nothing wrong with reuploading lost levels to Knyttlevels.

LPChip originally planned to remake the level archive to include several nice features, but now Looki is working on it. There are currently no deadlines or anything for the project. If you're asking about what'll become of the currently archived levels once the new archive is made, you'll have to ask LPChip or Looki.

I suppose I can answer this better than anyone here with more details too.

At a certain point in time, there was a crash that basically deleted many things in the database.

Users were suddenly marked as guests and some posts where gone.

When I tried to recover from this crash, it became obvious, that recovering was simply not possible without loosing too much, and it would be an unstable forum.

We've decided to go for a clean start, which is this forum.

The old forum and its content is still accessible by me, but most of the content (in terms of levels and such) is not available because they are hosted using external services, like sendspace. This is not the case for all levels though. Many have been uploaded to www.knyttlevels.com

As for old levels, I am currently trying with googoogjoob (who has almost every level) to transfer them to me. Once I have them, I'm going to make them available as one huge download (and by huge, think in gigabytes).

So the old stories are being compiled by you, LPChip? I'd like to have an idea of how many of them are gone; is the level archive as it is representative of levels released so far? And quality wise, have the better and/or more popular levels been recovered in this board or in the archive? Time wise, is there any prediction when they'll be back?

I'm sorry for nagging with so many questions but I'm curious about the board's history, about old levels, about level-making overall, and also anxious to get my hands on as many fine stories as I can, so I really appreciate your answers. I've tried to figure it out by myself but wasn't able to really get the overall process (till now), and part of it is also that I have my own image of what Knytt Stories could be or could have been and I'm curious about it as a whole.

Googoogjoob will send me his collection, which should be about every level he has downloaded which probably is about every level available, good and bad. Other than that, I can't tell you how many levels are gone, if only the quality levels are uploaded etc... Time wise can't say that either. It will be after I get the levels. But I suppose it will not be sooner than next year (which is atleast 3 weeks from now)

Thanks. Am looking forward to playing lost levels when/if they become available.

I've often wondered about this too.  Any plans to do some kind of rating system so that the gold can be separated from the dross? 

Googoogjoob will send me his collection, which should be about every level he has downloaded which probably is about every level available, good and bad. Other than that, I can't tell you how many levels are gone, if only the quality levels are uploaded etc... Time wise can't say that either. It will be after I get the levels. But I suppose it will not be sooner than next year (which is atleast 3 weeks from now)

Wow Googoogjoob has "nearly" every level, that impressive!  That would be such a nice archive 

and Headgrinder, i dont think that would ever happen we just have to do it the old fashioned way