> ... Ibuki-ryû Kaget�ded auburn hair, and a note.

where the bulk of the story has disappeared into that � character. In the raw HTML, instead of an actual � (U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER) there are 49,152 bytes of binary zeroes. I would guess that this is a case of straight-up disk corruption: 49,152 bytes is exactly 96 512-byte sectors, and in my experience, a chunk of data being replaced with binary zeroes is the most common visible symptom of bad disk sectors in the middle of a file.

Fun fact: the raw HTML for every DCForum thread contains two complete copies of the first message in the thread -- for reasons probably lost to time at this point, the software copies the full text of "reply 0" into an invisible <META NAME="Keywords"> tag (sans HTML formatting codes). In this case, both copies are corrupted in exactly the same way, which leads me to believe that the corruption is in the database (or whatever DCForum uses instead of a database) rather than in any cached rendered HTML it may have.

I too hope there is a good copy somewhere.