guys, I have an idea on how to get back to old pictures (of course he’s using crutches, but it works). You must enter a link to the gelbooru website (you can link exactly to the forum you need) into web.archive.org, so you can look at pictures that were 10 years ago. You may not see pictures, but you need to copy the link to this picture and paste it into the search and then it will open. I assume that this works with all images and tags, because the site still stores data about the images, it just cannot show them, but if you know the link to the image, then everything is ok. I hope I explained it clearly, sorry for my English

Edit: Alright, I apologize because that was rude. I was pretty incensed because I just saw that danbooru has done this now too.

Let me put it this way: imagine if you went to an art museum and they said "Sorry, the world has too many paintings now so we only show the new ones, and the old ones are all locked up in a back room that you need a special code to get into." Obviously that would be absurd.

As an oldschool nerd who was posting things on danbooru before this site even existed, it bothers me a lot to have access to art from that era cut off unless I use some kind of mumbo jumbo. It also means average users probably won't ever see it, which is unfortunate. It's not an acceptable solution to just refuse people access to the first page, which is what the "last page" really is. History starts at the beginning, not at the end, and this is a historical archive of art.

I suggest this as a compromise: have you considered doing what exhentai does now, and cutting off the search of middle pagination but allowing a skip to the end? You can no longer search in the "..." between page numbers there, but you can still click the ">>" to go to the last page.

I'm not seeing how being able to click that >> and start there is going to thrash your servers. Clearly, it won't. The problem is loading all the stuff in between.

Having to add an extra search term hardly counts as "inaccessible".