Is gone.
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That means I can repeat all my stories & no one will know, right?
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You’ll know. And I’ll probably know, too, but I’ll keep my trap shut.
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Feels odd. So final.
I remember when Gourmet stopped printing. But at least the recipes lived on at Epicurious.
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I was chatting with someone on my personal FB page about CH closing yesterday. And I just said “Hopefully with a lot of digging, the Internet Wayback Machine will be able to come up with threads should anyone wish to find a particular morsel of info.”
So I decided to try. I went to the Internet Wayback Machine and put in CH’s URL. OK, check out March 2022 - according to the IWM, “This calendar view maps the number of times chowhound.com was crawled by the Wayback Machine, not how many times the site was actually updated. Green indicates redirects (3xx).”
On March 17th (the biggest blue circle), the IWM crawled over 10.5K times on the CH site. 
I clicked on Saturday, March 26th. Got the main CH page. Clicked on Communities. They’re all there. You can click on “Quick Links” on the far right to find COTM or DOTM, etc. Or you can click one of what they call “Communities” (vs. Categories as they’re called here and what they really are! LOL) and dig deep that way. It takes awhile for the page to refresh and come up with what you’re looking for, but the new stuff is there.
I’ve not tried the search recently; last time I looked, it wasn’t easy to find what I was looking for. You’d probably have to go to the specific year/month of the post(s). For instance, Top Chef-Boston aired on Bravo from late 2014 - early 2015. So I went to October 2014 in the IWM, clicked on October 20th, 2014 (NOTE: The IWM crawls were a LOT less back then!)
I asked to View All Boards, then Food Media & News, and when they all came up, my Top Chef Boston Ep. #1 from 10/15/14 came up.
Click on that link, and I can get to my post.
So - it’s doable. It’s just time consuming. I’ve created a new thread here and copied/pasted most of this thread.
Perhaps clarifications can be added there vs. the RIP Chowhound thread.
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Thanks so much for this! Very valuable to know. It does preserve some things. I don’t think you can search plus it may give you the OP but not the discussion. Have not investigated much yet but will make some good use of it.
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I just did it with one of my Top Chef Boston recaps. My original start to Episode #1, and ALL responses are there as of the date you chose from the calendar map. The Google search, as suggested by @naf on my other thread, doesn’t give you the full discussion - just the initial post.
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Once the news of the closure broke (along with the knowledge that the corporate owners didn’t plan to do anything about keeping the data), Melanie Wong in particular started a major push to preserve CH threads, helped by some connections with some folks at the Internet Archive. There was plenty that was already there, but the massive crawls of the past few weeks both sent a ton more into the Wayback Machine and resulted in much better, less glitchy records, with whole threads and outlinks preserved rather than just OPs.
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Just to add that there seem to be 3 different archives for CH posts & this probably happened accidentally. If you go into the wayback machine (web.archive.org) & search the word “chowhound”, you will get several options: on http://chowhound.chow.com/boards, you will get a different archive than if you search for http://chowhound.com/ without the “chow”. And there seems to be one that’s just chow.com (although that one might just redirect you to the chowhound.com one). At any rate, two of them (chowhound.com & the one that’s only chow.com) get a timeline that starts with 1999 (before it became chow & when some of us were young) so you might think that you’re getting more but, if you compare the 3, you’ll also notice that the 2008-present archives aren’t the same in each so, unless something happens to combine the archives, you might want to hunt thru them all if you’re looking for old posts/threads. Again, these are not google searches – you need to go to web.archive.org and put the word “chowhound” into their search box. Was I clear? I’m not sure. Ahh, the price of memories.
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And, talking about going down rabbit holes: when checking my facts on the above, I wound up reading some realllllly long “Outer Borough” posts from early 2001 NYC. Brooklyn was just beginning to get some good restaurants and boy, did we write a lot.
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I saw briefly a post by Melanie to do so while I was working through my search process on the IWM. Thank you, Melanie! 
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And seeing the old old old OLD format of CH in its early incarnation(s) is sort of nostalgic as well. Same for my initial posts back in Nov. 2001 on the Boston area board.
It’s back! Sort of. A group called Static Media relaunched it, this month I think. Same logo, but no discussion forums. Static owns a bunch of other food-related sites, including Tasting Table, and sites for gamers and movie fans.
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who needs it? the non-discussion forum content of the last version of chowhound was pretty lowquality, and there are just too many sources of mediocre info out there .
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Zergnet is like spam all over every webpage. Ugh.
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It looks as if they’ve just bought the brand, and it’s unclear why, if it’s just going to be editorial content that’s similar in theme to that of their several other existing food-focused properties.
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Chowhound is alive again minus the message boards. Ha—- it’s a mix of reposted “chow.com” style articles + new material. It got bought by Static Media, a conglomerate that owns the Daily Meal, Tasting Table, etc. Looking at the current articles, I’m not seeing a strong editorial style or vision.
It acknowledges in the “About” section that “Chowhound was founded in 1997 by writer Jim Leff and Bob Okumura” but skips the part about the site being a message board.
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Yup. The “content” is all them. No contributions from readers. Seems like a Food Lifestyle site more than anything.
Only four recipes. So far.
I hope for the young writers there that they find success. The community is long gone, but they don’t seem inclined to hike that path anyway. I think their main difficulty will be in differentiating themselves in a crowded market, even among other holdings in their own parent company - Mashed, Foodie, Daily Meal, and Food Republic are also owned by same parent company, and they all look rather identical, not tuned to different audiences.
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