I took the liberty of going through the thread that has links to all the Elite threads* and documenting the state of them; broken forum code, picture links to nowhere, etc. If this is something that you'd like to see continued, I could go through the sticky threads and have a brief summary of their state.
*
http://www.405th.com/showthread.php/42333-Need-inspiration-Start-Here!-Elite-Halo-Costumes!
I have to ask, did you make sure to go through every page?
I found some threads that were missing images/attachments early on, but mid-thread there were some pictures.
For instance, Blue Realm's thread, while 90% of the picture links are dead, there is still 1 post in the entire thread that does still have pictures.
It might only be 1 post, but it is important to make note of.
I think a good first step would be to parse what still functions, delete what doesn't. With whats left, if there's two "how to pep" guides, use the one that's better/more relevant or create new stickies combining the best parts of both (and crediting the original authors for having created them in the first place).
For Youtube videos, we could (if we had the power) easily trim off the no longer functioning html code and the videos should work. While some videos might've been taken down or removed, I know a lot of the links still work even though you can't click them.
EDIT: Also, I'm sure that some of us here might like to save pictures that others post to serve as reference for inspiration on their own builds. I'm guilty of it, but I'm not sure if I have any pictures from threads that have lost their images; however, I'm sure that there might be others on here that might still have those pictures.
I think it might be a good idea
Art Andrews to start a thread asking if anyone happens to have DL'd photos from others that they should post them. What do you think?
Personally, if we have the opportunity to fix some threads by adding pictures back into them I think we should.
Take Bluerealm Studios for example, they had phenomenal work that they showed off here; I'm sure that for them and other really popular builds back in the day that someone has some of those pictures somewhere saved to their computers.
Still somewhat on that same topic...
Now, naming conventions of files can make things hard to sort out at times. While we might all upload pics of ancient threads, we might not know who they belong to.
Which brings me to asking this:
Is there any chance that you
Art Andrews) could make it so that our Username gets appended at the beginning (or end) of each file name for the ones that we upload here?
So instead of someone downloading:
"DCM-Image1"
or
"249427_1956719350010_1003513539_32276116_8095128_n"
we would instead download:
"WandererTJ - DCM-Image1"
or
"WandererTJ - 249427_1956719350010_1003513539_32276116_8095128_n"