[Dieser Beitrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar]
Summary: With some effort, I managed to make the Warmachine University accessible again about a year after it went offline. The Warmachine University Archive restores the contents of the original wiki for Warmachine MK3.
Direct link to the Warmachine University Archive
Warmachine University was my go-to resource for Warmachine and Hordes. After discovering the site many years ago (back when it was still known as Battlecollege), there were hardly any days when I did not look something up there – whether it was Warmachine–Hordes rules or ideas for list building.
With the announcement of the MK4 edition of Warmachine, it became clear to me that Warmachine University would soon lose much of its relevance for most players. It therefore seemed likely that the site would go offline sooner or later.
For this reason, I created an offline copy of the entire Warmachine University wiki sometime in the summer of 2022 using HTTrack. I let the computer run for many hours (days?) so that it would also “crawl” parts of loswarmachine, privateerpress.com, and other related sites.
Later on, I was pleased to see that the operators, after consulting the community, announced that they did not intend to take Warmachine University offline, but rather to keep it alive as an archive.
Nevertheless, in April 2025 the site did go offline – this time for good. Apparently, the domain or hosting was not renewed. The same had happened to loswarmachine.com. As one of the former operators told me, it had already been “down and gone” since February 2025, and he did not believe that any copy still existed.
From discussions on Reddit, I know that I was not alone – even beyond my own gaming group, there are people who still play MK3 or at least miss Warmachine University.
This led me to wonder whether it might be possible to transform my HTML dump back into a proper wiki. Recently, I managed to do just that – with the help of Python and Codex.
| How did the reconstruction work? First, I created a Python script to restore the MediaWiki structure. For writing this script, I already made use of ChatGPT 5.4. I then had Codex execute the script and reconstruct the wiki within a Docker environment consisting of one container for the wiki itself and another for the database. After that came the tedious part. Many details were not correct: images were missing, certain formats did not work properly, and various adjustments had to be made. Additionally, as requested, I removed the LOS team as authors and made a number of further smaller modifications. |
After consulting with the former LOS team, I am therefore pleased to make Warmachine University available again: the Warmachine University Archive. I hope there are others out there who will be just as happy about this as I am.
If you encounter any errors or if something does not work, I would appreciate a message via email (see imprint).
Addendum dated April 14, 2026: About a week after the archive went live, I discovered that the images from the wiki were disappearing. After some effort, I found out that this was because my offline copy contained only the thumbnails, not the original images. The wiki was now trying to update the thumbnails—and could no longer find the images. As a result, all images were shown as missing. However, I was able to reconstruct the vast majority of the images by inserting the thumbnails over the weekend, for the most part, as now fixed images. In some cases, however, this was not entirely possible because certain resolutions are expected that I have not yet generated automatically (!) from the thumbnails. But I will complete this gradually over time.