The Ubuntu Forums Archive

[aaronprisk]

I am happy to announce the Ubuntu Forums Archive. 2 million conversations spanning 20 years converted into readable Markdown files. For two decades, the Ubuntu Forums served as the online gathering space for the Ubuntu Community. Whether you were seeking technical support, requesting a package be added to the repositories, engaging in a lively debate about desktop environments or just looking for a place to make like minded friends, the Ubuntu Forums is where you went.

What happened to the Ubuntu Forums?

The Ubuntu Forums were officially shut down in 2025. With the migration of community conversations and activities to the Ubuntu Discourse combined with the aging VBulletin backend, it was determined that it was time to retire the long running platform.

Why Archive the Ubuntu Forums?

There are a handful of reasons:

Historical preservation
We often realize how important information is when it’s too late and it’s no longer available; be it books, music, photographs or videos. The Internet Archive has done a tremendous job of cataloging an incomprehensible amount of human expression and knowledge, but even they can’t capture absolutely everything. The task of saving and sharing human derived information for the next generation falls on all of us.

For the people
As you may have heard me say before, Ubuntu does not exist without the people.
In a recent meeting with former Ubuntu Forums moderators, we were digging into the archival files in preparation for the conversion. One of the moderators took notice of a thread from a particular former Forums member. He spoke of this member’s prolific contributions to the Networking category and how he helped countless people back when Ubuntu networking wasn’t quite so OOTB. He mentioned that this forum member and close friend had passed away a few years ago leaving behind this rich legacy of volunteerism and peer to peer support. This user, along with so many like him, helped build and sustain the foundation of the Ubuntu Community. We honor their legacy through the act of preserving these records.

Opportunity for continuation
We very purposefully chose Markdown as the archive format to allow anyone to easily download, view and parse the Forums content. As it stands, anyone is welcome to download one or all of the files and read them in a browser or markdown capable utility. If someone would want to build a new frontend or a proper librarian tool for the content, they are free and welcome to do so.

Where is the Ubuntu Forums Archive?

You can find the archive at: https://github.com/Ubuntu-Community-Team/Ubuntu-Forums-Archive

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Thank you to all who contributed to the Ubuntu Forums over the years!

Special thanks to @rubi1200, @Wild_Man, @Frogs_Hair, @bashing-om, @guiverc, @irihapeti and the Ubuntu Communications Council for helping with the archival process. Extra coffee beans for you all!

[bashing-om]

Kudos and Chocolate Chip Cookies to Arron, our Community Engineer extraordinaire. It is his sustained, so long termed - dedicated efforts that make the old Forums’ available. So much went on behind the scenes in making the archive a reality.

-Many thanks in preserving our heritage-

[XxXxX]

well done, very well done indeed. i myself was on that Ubuntu forum for many years.

its not just Ubuntu but Linux as a whole, it is built by the few for the many

remembering how we got here is not just a legacy but history in the making

from a long time Linux user to all those that have contributed, past, present and future, thank you ..

[paddylandau]

Thank you, Aaron, for your hard work!

The archive is huge. Is there a way to search for a specific topic or post? In my extensive notes, I have a number of references to the old Ubuntu Forums, e.g. like these two:

• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2463162
• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2479483&p=14113643#post14113643

Obviously, the links no longer work.

Are there perhaps other ways to search the archive? Although I know about GitHub, I’m unfamiliar with it and wouldn’t know how to access it efficiently or even semi-efficiently.

It’s quite sad that Canonical chose not to make the old Ubuntu Forums available (read-only) to the public.

[ericmarceau]

I am relieved that the material was preserved and very grateful for all the time and hard work graciously offered by the Archiving Team for getting getting the archive to where it is!

Like you, Paddy, I visited the archive on GitHub.

Because GitHub is limiting listings to only the first 100 items in any large folder, what I call net-walking doesn’t give full access. You would only ever be able to use GitHub’s built-in search engine, which means that there is much that might never be discovered because you can’t “take a stroll” thru memory lane.

I too would be eternally grateful when an effective indexing/search mechanism does become available.

Maybe I missed it, but I am curious about the decision that did not maintain any keyword or tag association for the various topics. Not having those will certainly make the task of any new search engine that much harder to pinpoint relevant/useful information. Unless, that keyword info was preserved in hidden files (fingers crossed).

[vidtek99]

Well done to all who made this happen. The Linux community will be enriched through your hard work. Heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you.

Tony

[ricmarques]

Hi, @paddylandau

You wrote:

@paddylandau

The archive is huge.

Indeed it is! Actually, I just did an experiment of cloning the repository to my local machine and therefore I can tell now the size of it: the archive is 16 GB in size when including the hidden “.git” directory (and about 12.8 GB in size when excluding that directory):

$ mkdir -pv ~/git/github/Ubuntu-Community-Team

$ cd ~/git/github/Ubuntu-Community-Team

$ git clone https://github.com/Ubuntu-Community-Team/Ubuntu-Forums-Archive.git
Cloning into 'Ubuntu-Forums-Archive'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 1963243, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (51/51), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Total 1963243 (delta 49), reused 47 (delta 47), pack-reused 1963192 (from 3)
Receiving objects: 100% (1963243/1963243), 2.88 GiB | 5.31 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (15573/15573), done.

$ du -sh Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/
16G	Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/

$ du -sh Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/.git/
3,2G	Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/.git/

You’ve asked:

@paddylandau

Is there a way to search for a specific topic or post? In my extensive notes, I have a number of references to the old Ubuntu Forums, e.g. like these two:

• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2463162
• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2479483&p=14113643#post14113643

Well, I believe there are at least two ways to do that. The first way - and as I’ve just cloned the repository - is to search my local machine. I guessed that the message threads numeric identifiers (2463162 , 2479483) would be part of the file names… and I was right! So, here I’m using the “locate” tool to find files that contain those filenames. As you can see below, after having cloned the repository, I begin with updating the “locate” database (using the sudo updatedb command) and then I use locate to find those posts:

$ sudo updatedb

$ locate 2463162
/home/ricmarques/git/github/Ubuntu-Community-Team/Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/Security/thread_2463162_Could_we_create_an_immutable_incremental_backup_sy.md

$ locate 2479483
/home/ricmarques/git/github/Ubuntu-Community-Team/Ubuntu-Forums-Archive/General_Help/thread_2479483_Jammy_Why_some_package_do_not_get_updated.md

There would usually be an alternative way to search, using the Web interface of GitHub and specifically the “code search” feature of GitHub. However:

1 - I believe that requires creating a (free or paid) account in GitHub to use that “search code” feature of the web interface of GitHub, while being logged in with your GitHub account.

2 - However, even if you that, you’ll find (as I’ve also did, just now) that the content in “Ubuntu-Community-Team/Ubuntu-Forums-Archive cannot be searched because it is too large”:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AUbuntu-Community-Team%2FUbuntu-Forums-Archive%202463162&type=code

I hope this helps, at least a bit

[aaronprisk]

Indeed, as I mentioned in the main topic, it’s a very large number of files. The file names contain the ID number and thread topic for discovery.
I mentioned to the other mods that if I get some free time, I may look into building a web based, search engine tool to make it easier to navigate for those who don’t want to download the files onto their own machine.

[teward]

Probably could do it with some kind of full-text-engine indexing with like elastic or something on the backend, then have a frontend for querying with full-text search or ID search or such. That might be a solution.

[dmxplx]

Or this? GitHub - sourcebot-dev/sourcebot: Sourcebot is a self-hosted tool that helps humans and agents understand your codebase. · GitHub

[paddylandau]

@ricmarques — Thank you, that was all interesting! I don’t know where you posted the image, but all I get is, “Content not viewable in your region.” Do you know that you can insert images directly into posts here?

@aaronprisk

I may look into building a web based, search engine tool

That would be awesome! Do you think that Canonical would be happy to host it on its servers? I wouldn’t want you to have to pay for it!

[vidtek99]

I just did a search looking for a post I made a couple of years ago.

This is the answer> Sorry, we had to truncate this directory to 1,000 files. 32,720 entries were omitted from the list. Latest commit info may be omitted.

What does this mean? Why truncate a directory to 1000 files? Will the rest ever be included?

[mbrouil3]

@vidtek99

Why truncate a directory to 1000 files? Will the rest ever be included?

The rest of the data exists and is there, but due to limitations, the software can’t display everything.

Github’s limitations are a big obstacle facing everyone trying to search the archive.

Right now the only workaround is to clone the git repo, then search file contents with grep. It’s very cumbersome and not at all straight-forward.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m ecstatic that @aaronprisk was able to take the data & posts from our beloved legacy forums (o7) and upload them for the general public. THANK YOU!!!

That said, I am trying to work on a PoC to get the markdown data in an easy-to-navigate and searchable format, but don’t hold your breath on me finishing.

[aaronprisk]

Hey folks,
I whipped up a very quick webui to browse the archive:

Ubuntu Forums Archive

I’ll look into adding some more bells and whistles and a deep search, but this should help get things off the ground.

[mbrouil3]

Fabulous kick-off effort Aaron!

Apologies if this is a simple ask, but is it possible for other users to work on this, as it appears to be on GitHub? I’m sure others would love to help contribute.

[vidtek99]

@aaronprisk Thank you so much. I just went to the archive and the first 5 work well, and the following few do too. Unfortunately the Multimedia & video section goes nowhere. Maybe it is because it is so big compared to all the others I tried?

Anyway I and many others really appreciate your efforts. Well done young man from this old fart.

[aaronprisk]

I noticed that right after I posted. Looks like there were some issues with how it handled the giant index. I chunked it up and re-uploaded everything. Give it a quick refresh on your browser and it should play nicer now.

@mbrouil3 aboslutely! feel free to drop in any issues or PRs: GitHub - Ubuntu-Community-Team/ubuntu-forums-archive-webui: Simple webgui for browsing the Ubuntu Forums archive · GitHub

[popey]

@aaronprisk

Hey folks,
I whipped up a very quick webui to browse the archive:

Ubuntu Forums Archive

I’ll look into adding some more bells and whistles and a deep search, but this should help get things off the ground.

Hah, while you were doing that, I made this:

https://ubuntuforums.popey.com/

You can either put a forum link that you remember from the past, or an ID number.

Or just edit your old ubuntu forums links

Change the https://ubuntuforums.org/ part to https://ubuntuforums.popey.com/.

e.g. this original URL:

• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=964196
  becomes this new URL:
• https://ubuntuforums.popey.com/showthread.php?t=964196

Which looks like this:

It also keeps a little list of the pages you’ve visited.

There’s currently no ‘full text search’, but that could be added if people think it’s worth adding.

Note: Not every page is available yet, it’s still processing, and will take a little while. Computer go brrrr.

[aaronprisk]

Oooooo! This is so cool!!
Keeping the nostalgia dialed to the max with the theming too