The old SVPCA web-site was built by Richard Forrest, who died suddenly on 9 January 2026. Richard’s passing has been a keenly felt blow for the community, and there was some uncertainty over whether the SVPCA would continue after his death.
Unfortunately, the old site went offline not long after Richard’s death, and it had already been in the middle of some re-engineering, which meant that the site was not in great shape at that time. Happily, Adam Smith was able to obtain a dump of the surviving code and database. My colleague Jason Skomorowski persuaded Claude AI to spin up a version of the site using MySQL and PHP in containers, and make a static dump. The resulting site had had some of the errors fixed, but many more remained. At this point I took the partially fixed site and guided another Claude instance through fixing up most of the remaining problems. As a result, the present version of the site is in a rather better state than Richard left it in. Some errors remain, but I think we are now at the point where further repair efforts would not be worth the investment.
I am pleased to present the resulting recovered and enhanced site, with Adam’s and Jason’s help, not only as a record of past SVPCA meetings but also as a tribute to Richard.
Great to see this back.
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