There are two forms of archive of the Board available: True Archives, and Subject Archives.

In order to allow you to view and link to the posts in the archives, it has been necessary to make them generally editable. Please do not abuse this. The text of the posts should not be edited under any circumstances. Doing so may result in revocation of comment-adding ability.

True Archives

The PPC Board Archives are stored in a spreadsheet format, and can take a bit of effort to read properly. They date back to mid-2008 - the 2008 Archives are attached to the beginning of the 2009 Archives, for simplicity’s sake. The posts are not ordered strictly by date, but rather in the order they appeared on the Board. Therefore:

• The leftmost column is a unique post ID.
• The third column from the left references these IDs. A post with no entry under ‘ancestry’ was the top of a thread. One entry indicates a second-level post - the row in question was a reply to the post with the listed ID number. Posts further down a thread have their ancestry slash-separated - so a post with ancestry ‘80143/80148’ is a reply to 80148, which was itself a response to 80143, the top-level post. There may be other responses to 80148, and definitely are to 80143.
• In between these two columns is the date and time of the post.
• The final three columns on the right are the author, subject, and message. Since messages are usually rather long, the best way to read them is either to copy them to a text editing program, or to click on the message and then click on the bar at the top which shows the text. This will expand the message in the spreadsheet into a readable box.

• To link to a specific thread, it is necessary to add a comment. By viewing the comment in the Comments thread, it is then possible to obtain a link to the comment. Please make your comments informative and correctly spelled; please make them in the author cell, rather than the message.

Subject Archives

Subject Archives (or just plain ‘Subjects’) are collections of any form of archive from before the posts downloaded by Tomash. They mostly consist of the Board’s front page, as saved by the Wayback Machine. They do not include the text of any actual posts - just the subject lines, with author and date names. Where information from an actual post exists - whether it be a link mentioned therein, or an archive of the post itself - this should be linked to in the column to the right of the subject lines.

Subjects are not comprehensive (because the Wayback Machine isn’t, either). The massive gaps in posting reflect what is and is not available, not actual posting trends. Note that the 2008 Subjects stop at the point where the True Archives pick up.

To enhance readability, the level of indentation has been simulated with >s. However, this does not apply after 15 levels of indentation - at that point, all posts become level, and it devolves into guesswork.

As with the True Archives, Subjects are open to comments; in this case there is only one column, so it is much simpler to apply.