Believe it or not, you can still visit parts of the Despair Faction boards archived in the Web Archive. However, what is archived is highly fragmented - whole chunks of threads are simply missing. It’s not enough to simply go there and browse - eventually you’ll just hit a wall and be unsure how to proceed. But surprisingly many pages were saved and can be viewed online. You just need to know what those pages are.
1: Start by going to archive.com/web and in the search bar, type in despairfaction.com
2: You will get a list of dates for each time the page was archived. Open any of them. The most stable versions, I believe, are around the Crash Love era.
3: In a separate tab, open this website:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://despairfaction.com/*
This is a map of every webpage that is archived under the DF site.
4: On the first tab, go to one of the main sub-forums and search for a thread that interests you.
Hover over the thread. A bar should appear in the bottom left corner of your browser (Mac) giving the address of the site. Make note of the number that ends the thread. It should look like t=xxxxx
5: In the second tab, in the “Filter Results” bar, copy showthread.php?t=xxxxx.
You should now have a list of every page archived under that thread. If there are no results (as sometimes happens), it, sadly, was not archived. But if you find pages, then it exists and you can see what was there! (I highly recommend the “Weird/Funny things your parents say about AFI” - a lot of it is still intact)
You may also get a printable version of the thread as well.
I provide this information not to lead people away from this forum (as far as I can tell, you can’t really post on the archived DF, if by some miracle you could login - somebody test it?), but to provide a resource to anyone who felt nostalgic about the old boards, which were a big part of AFI fan culture.
STORMS, If this thread breaks some sort of exclusivity rule, feel free to close it.
Happy browsing!