Zetaboards

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ZetaBoards
Zetaboards.png
URL http://www.zetaboards.com/
Status Online!
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

ZetaBoards is a forum host that offers both paid and free-with-ads forums to anyone. It claims to have been "used by millions of people looking for a place to gather, discuss and share.". Initial checks show that over 75,000 boards are listed on their "Featured Board Index" page on their site, showing the scale of this project.

Although there has been no indication that ZetaBoards will cease to exist, they have experienced multiple periods of downtime recently, the latest being for a few days 2016-11-21 to 2016-11-23 for many of their boards. Combining this with the decline in popularity of forums with the move to other social platforms and the increase of ad-blockers reducing revenue for ad-supported websites including ZetaBoards, it would be worth preemptively archiving the forums to prevent loss of data in the future.

Current status

Currently a list of board URLs is being discovered, using the numerical URL format described below.

Once this is completed, these boards will be sorted into private and public boards, before being archived.


URL format

ZetaBoards URLs have two formats:

The standard on is SERVER.zetaboards.com/BOARD where SERVER is s1 - s15 (and maybe also w1 - w15?) and BOARD is the text name of the board.

The other format is wetaboards.com/directory/?p=jump&v=BOARDNUM&s=SERVERNUM where SERVERNUM is the numerical ID of the board and SERVERNUM is the numerical number of the server. At this point in time, it is unclear how the distinction is made between s servers and w servers, however by making SERVERNUM 0 you will usually be redirected to the appropriate server. This URL will redirect you to the standard URL that is detailed above.


Board Types

ZetaBoards provides two types of boards - public and private. Public boards can be accessed by anyone, whereas private boards can only be read by a logged in member, making their archiving harder. ZetaBoards has an optional captcha on the signup page and uses Cloudflare anti spam protection, increasing the difficulty.