About this archive
wc3sear.ch was one of the earliest and largest Warcraft III modding sites. It ran from 2003 until December 2006, when it merged into The Hive Workshop, where much of its work still lives.
This is a read-only reconstruction. You can browse and download everything that survives, but the interactive half of the site — accounts, uploads, posting, ratings, private messages — is intentionally absent.
What survives
What doesn't
- 231 resource files of 14,336. Their records survive — title, author, description, comments and ratings — but the file itself is gone, so those pages show no download.
- Private messages, email addresses, IP addresses and passwords. Deliberately never imported.
- The original forum layout. Threads survive with their original ids, and every board name was recovered from an archived copy of the original index, but the order and the announcement/sticky distinction did not survive the 2006 migration. See the forum index.
- The staff-only board. “Former Staff” was invisible to members on the original site and stays that way here: it is not listed, not readable and not searchable.
Old links still work
Original ids were preserved throughout, so historic URLs redirect to their modern equivalent — index.php?p=Maps&ID=730, viewtopic.php?t=64, viewforum.php?f=4 and files/downloads.php?l=1&ID=730 all resolve.
Pages from the original site
- FAQ — the site's own, as written at the time
- How to import icons into your map (TFT)
- How to import models into your map
- How to create icons
Where the content came from
Resources, comments, ratings and member profiles come from the site's own final database dump. The forum came from the vBulletin database that wc3sear.ch was merged into, which preserved the original phpBB topic and post ids. Files come from the site's two servers — including a mirror recovered from a DVD, without which roughly a fifth of the archive, most icons and skins among it, would have been lost.