Is there a website that archives forum messages?

I belong to another forum where all the old topics self delete after about a year. I can’t tell what kind of forum it is. It’s not vBulletin, but it says “bbs.website.com” in the domain. It’s tragic because it’s a great resourceful forum, but it’s members don’t know why this happens. There’s no contact with the website owners. Once the old topics fall off they’re gone for good. Does anyone know a site that stores forum messages in perhaps a condensed way?

The Internet Archive strives to keep a record of stuff. It doesn’t get ahold of everything, though. This is the reason the Indie Web movement advocates keeping control of your own content, so that it can’t be deleted by some third party on a whim.

Thank you my old friend. I was aware of Wayback Machine from long ago. I didn’t think to use it for some reason. I thought it was more for design captures. Here’s what I did… I visited: https://archive.org/index.php and then copied the forum/section directly from the website and pasted it into the archive.org’s search. Is there a better way to use it? Like, if I want a particular keyword such as “apple”. Funny how it shows some topics back in 2006, but then skips to 2012. It’s hit and miss when you click on the topic titles. Some are there, and some aren’t.

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Yeah, to be honest, I don’t know it any better than you do. Often I find that URLs I’ve saved in some text file are dead, but that if I type them into the archive I find old content there. So I’ve mainly found it handy for retrieving pages at specific URLs that have disappeared.

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