Restoring old attachments

[Soarer]

This suggestion got ignored in some other thread, so I'll make it again

There must be a way to bring back what's left of the old attachments, even if they aren't proper attachments as far as SMF is concerned. How about something like...

1. Build a lookup table from the old DB, to get a filename for each old attachment ID.
2. Store the attachments somewhere accessible.
3. Modify the SMF page display code to replace [ Attachment Invalid Or Does Not Exist ] nnnnn[/attach] with an IMG or URL tag.
... and replace direct links to attachments similarly.

Since most of the attachments still exist, somewhere, it would be crazy not to try and restore them somehow.

Is there any way I could contribute to such an effort?

[alaricljs]

Nothing gets ignored, even if there is a lack of response.  GH has no full time employees, this whole thing has already taken a whole lot more time than some of us have and yes there is still more work to do.

[Soarer]

Look, I know there's no full time employees etc etc. I'm speaking not from a sense of entitlement, just as someone who's put a fair bit in over the two years I've been here (as well as a fair bit of douchbagging, I admit). And I simply didn't know if the other post had been noticed at all.

The thing is, last I looked, I didn't see restoring old attachments on the roadmap. I don't know if that's because of a lack of technical ability, or because of a mistaken belief that it will all be rebuilt by users, or that they are not considered as important as (I think) they are, or something else. Reading between the lines of various other posts, it seems as though you guys had already given up on restoring them, for whatever reason.

So, like, what's the plan, man? And is there any way I can help with it? Does my idea above have any merit, or is there a better method?

Seems to me like VB4 would've had pretty much the table that is needed already, and the rest would be mainly a set of regular expressions to replace [ Attachment Invalid Or Does Not Exist ] s and [url]s in the post display functions. And of course, making sure not to introduce any vulnerabilities (although the input to these replaces should already be sanitised by SMF).

Naturally I don't expect anything to happen straight away, but a nod that it will happen if it's possible would be nice!