About This Restoration

This site is a reconstruction of localracechat.com built from Internet Archive captures. It is not the original site, it is not run by the people who ran the original site, and the message board it is built around has been closed since 2016. This page sets out exactly what was recovered, what was replaced and what is gone.

What the archive held

The Internet Archive holds 247,691 unique URLs for this domain. That number is misleading on its own, because 240,145 of them are individual forum thread URLs. The rest is the site around the board: the portal front page, the section indexes, the classifieds, the gallery, the links directory and the fantasy league.

Which era was rebuilt

Captures fall into clear eras and they do not look alike. The 2005 to 2006 pages are a stock vBulletin install with the title Home and no identity of their own. From late 2006 the portal appears and the site starts to look like itself. From 2011 to 2016 the design is settled: the vBadvanced portal on the front, the LRC wordmark in place, the full forum tree listed, and dated headlines with the members who posted them.

That last era is the master. The primary sources are the homepage capture from 19 February 2016 and the forum index from the same day. Where those two are thin, the 2011 and 2013 captures fill in.

Captures from 2020 and 2021 are not the site at all. They are a third party mirror that rewrote every URL to end in .html. They were used only to confirm section names, never as a source for design or copy.

What was restored

• The identity. The wordmark is the original lrc-logo.png, recovered at 300 by 96 pixels from the forum image directory. The colours on this site are taken from it: the royal blue of the lettering, the near black of the star behind it, and the warm yellow the portal used for highlight rows.
• The structure. Every page that existed has a page here, and the navigation follows the original tabs.
• The board directory. All forty eight sections in their seven categories, with their original vBulletin forum numbers, read straight out of the February 2016 forum index. No section was renamed, merged or dropped.
• The site rules. The site’s own writing, restored close to verbatim from its capture, including the point where the capture cuts off mid sentence.
• The news archive. Fifty one items with a real headline, a real timestamp and the handle of the member who posted it, read out of the portal blocks of sixteen separate homepage captures.

What was replaced, and why

The only original images on this site are the LRC wordmark and the 2016 site banner, both recovered from the archive.

What is gone and will stay gone

• The board itself. Roughly 240,000 thread URLs exist as archive records, but the posts were database driven and were never exported. They cannot be rebuilt from captures, and no attempt is made to fake them.
• The news bodies. The fifty one recovered news items were overwhelmingly racing series press releases posted by members. That copy belongs to the series and their promoters, not to LRC, so only the record is republished, never the article.
• The gallery, the classifieds and the fantasy league. Listing text, prices, photographs, picks and standings were all database driven. None of it survives.
• The links directory. Captured as index pages only, and most of what it pointed at is offline.
• Member data. No account, no post count, no join date and no email address from the original site exists here, and none was sought.

Things that never existed

It is worth being explicit about these, because their absence is deliberate and not an oversight. Local Race Chat never had a WordPress install. It had no RSS feed of its own articles. It had no author biography pages. It published no downloadable documents.

It also has no verified social media presence. The board had Facebook login enabled, which is a vBulletin feature and not a page, and the 2016 portal loads images from Constant Contact, which confirms a newsletter existed. Neither gives a profile URL or a list. No social links are shown on this site because none can be verified, and inventing them would be worse than leaving them out.

Named members

Four member handles appear in the news archive because they posted the items: SteveS, Racerchaser, Jeffy294 and Dirtnut, along with others recorded in the source data. These are the handles of real people. They are reproduced exactly as the portal recorded them and nothing beyond the handle is asserted about any of them. No handle was invented, and no item is attributed to anyone the archive does not name.

How to check any of this

Every restored page that makes a claim about the original site links to the capture it came from. The board directory links section by section. The news archive links item by item. If something here cannot be traced back to a capture, it should not be on the site, and it is worth reporting through the contact page.