I have been looking for answers the day the site went down "for good"...
This is so sad, as someone else said, this place was here for the entirety of my opiate use and I have so many memories, posts and threads that taught me so much throughout the years. To see it all just disappear is so sad.
If anyone knows how to get into contact with Jonny, I would really like to talk to him as to somehow work something out financially, because it means that much to me.
Apologies in advance for resuscitating an old thread - but I'm seconding this notion. I'll try and use some of the contacts I have from within that community to try and see if I can get in contact with him. If anyone on here is reading this and talks to Nick, Brony or Chops I would try reaching out to those fellas, they'd be most likely to have a copy of the database (from least likely -> most likely, in my opinion). I was a hugely active member there for 10+ years, but I've been clean now for almost 7, so my usage of the site was few and far between in the past few years...although I too am incredibly saddened to see what I had told everyone and been flamed for, for years, be exposed for everyone to see as the truth. I mentioned countless times that I would be more than happy to have taken on the *entirety* of the hosting costs of the site, and given JM access to a server with the necessary bandwidth and resources, no need to even do as much as change my user permissions. Having worked in varied online business fields and extensively so within the hosting and webdev communities, I knew from day one that he was full of shit about the site costing $X - X being whatever he needed to pay his dealer that month, of course.
As someone who literally helped develop the forums software that both this site and Opiophile ran on (vBulletin) for years and as such participated in building/supporting online discussion forums with active user counts 100x of opi at it's peak popularity it was clear to myself and several others (the more technically proficient among us, anyway) what was going on. It was discussed many times off-site at length for years before the site finally died that the claims he frequently made were alarmingly bogus to the dorkier bunch - I recall actually mentioning this very point in the drama thread that I saw the last time I went to visit opiophile (prior to today) so I guess it's been down for some time.
I found this thread via google and it's right up on the top results - JonnyMohawk - I say this to you, as a plea from someone who personally would like to preserve the wealth of knowledge and culture that developed on those forums, as well as the 800 or so posts of mine many of which were quite long and all told had over a million combined thread views at one point -- please do the right thing and let those of us who wish to take the responsibility of running the site (be it fiscally, technically, or in whatsoever way) do so. If it's true that you're "holding the database hostage for money" (which I don't really think is natural to your character, at least from the interaction we have had with each other) then allow me to pay the ransom. You can reach me any time I won't speak a word of it to anyone and will simply reload the database onto active hosting and buy the rights to the domain name/branding/archived SQL database.
EDIT: Ryan, what up man. Hit me up some time. Maybe we can figure this thing out.