Unfortunately the dynamic nature of the page URLs (e.g. the ? after
/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=14915) mean that wayback machine isn't archiving them. I'm also kind of frustrated by the thread situation, given that so much of this work is archival in nature and I spent a lot of time collecting notes that link out to old topics. I know mla is run by volunteers so I don't want to complain and super appreciate all the work they do. Meanwhile just hoping threads can be restored in some fashion.
One way around this would be to move to a more modern forum stack (Discourse) that is better supported and that can be hosted someplace that is pretty resilient (e.g. you can one-click add a DigitalOcean droplet with Discourse, and get frequent backups and other things built-in). Discourse uses fixed URLs like
/t/topic-name/26329 which I believe are better for wayback machine archiving. Moving entirely different forum software is a tough migration tho, and would change the UI on people which not everyone may love.
Another way around this is to move some content to a database like Airtable or a wiki so that fixed knowledge can be put someplace (like an archive of cards and their images), which would link back to threads where those were first mentioned. But all this is getting pretty off topic
