Thanks: 
You're welcome, Simbaspirit.
Finally, after about 12 hours of work I'm almost done. Phew... that was some awful work!
But first things first.
Sadiki gave me the old backups he got from Mufasa back in 2008, I think.
As many of you know, they have been corrupted badly and could not be repaired. Some of the most important tables were missing (users, threads, etc.).
However the vital post-table could be saved and it contained usernames, threadname and of course the messages.
But without a working structure and the thread-tables no converter could work it it. On top of that, back then, the backup was made with vB 2. We are running vB 4 what made the dump incompatible. So yes, it appeared that the threads and posts had been lost for good.
Then Sadiki told me about what happend and as I already got quite some experience with "restoring" lost forums (e. g. The Furry Forum, The Savannah, and several other forums) I had an idea of how to restore the postings, but I lacked the experience when it came to coding.
That's where my friend s-tlk (also a long-term member here) came in.
He had already offered his help before and he's a real genius when it comes to scripting!
So I told him about the situation and showed him our backup. He was able to retrieve some postings and included them into a plain vB3 installation. I don't know what kind of magic he did there, but after some problems it seemed to work. In case you are interested he could surely provide some details once he's back from his "journey to the wild".
So with that all done, that's where I came in. I merged that installation with this board.
Unfortunately, this was really ugly since the import script didn't work at first and I had to manually adjust some setting and tables in the database. I also had to deal with wrong post- and thread ids, crashed databases and other creepy things... But don't make me go into details there.
I'm glad I'm able to take a small break now.
And thank God it all seems to have worked out in the end.. I couldn't have done it alone!
To make a long story short: Now you can find what we could restore in the forum "great kings of the past" (not availabe for guests, sorry.)
However, since the thread table could not be saved we could not sort them in the proper subforums. That's why they are all mixed up right now. Maybe the team here will work on that someday, I don't know. We'll see about that.
So now it's there for you, in case you're interested. Of course I understand if you're done with it and just want to start over. That's also fine.
There are still some issues like merging imported users with the existing ones or fixing minor code issues, but for now things look okay. In case you notice something odd, you can write me a PM with detailed information. That would help a lot.
Oh and I also took some time an added new Timon smileys (or is it smilies?). Hope you like them!
