Here's the official 2017 blackout thanks list, in sort of chronological order:
A guy whose first name starts with J at Vodafone for being helpful as much as he could and when he was no longer in a position to rescue shit personally he put me on to someone else.
Pimp-X for offering to help and for pointing me in the direction of others who might also be able to.
Ender for much the same, and for making himself available if the people I was already talking to couldn't/wouldn't help.
A guy whose first name starts with S at Vodafone for being helpful as much as he could and when he was no longer in a position to rescue shit personally he put me on to someone else.
A couple of guys at Vodafone that I never interacted with personally but whom an email trail reveals were asked by S to look at shit that wasn't their problem.
A guy whose name starts with A at Vodafone for being the guy who got physical access to the dead old server, confirmed it was fubar, yanked the drives, found a working server of comparable vintage with similar hardware, put the drives in, confirmed the data looked intact, and who then ran out of time to help more and then yanked the drives and just hung on to them so they didn't get wiped and thrown out as junk (oh jesus this came so close to happening I want to kiss this guy).
BaM for helping me set up new hosting in Welly and for also making himself available as a destination for the drives if I could get them picked up from A.
Vorlon for physically going to Voda and collecting the drives from A, then delivering them to Crankshaw.
Crankshaw for managing to get the ancient drives in a box, boot it, get the box on a network, find the forums db sql, and export it and upload it to me.
Everyone who emailed, texted, and left messages on FB offering support and for generally reminding me that I wasn't the only person who didn't want to see this place just die.
Edit - the fact that I could draw on so many people whom I still know more by their gamer tags than their actual names is either terribly cool or terribly scary.
Edit - photos from A. Pour one out for the departed nzgames.paradise.net.nz, with its old SCSI HDs, floppy drive, serial and parallel ports, analog VGA video socket, and dead mobo. Originally set up by Goldie back in the day it served us well until it didn't.
Lol look at that asset sticker - December 2000.
