What Yahoo killed when it bought Maktoob

It feels like a lifetime since I heard anyone mention the Maktoob forums. Seeing it was lost after the Yahoo acquisition is sad.

What was actually on those forums was the documentary record of a specific moment in Arab cultural life, the moment, roughly 2001 to 2009, when a generation of Arab kids first got broadband, first encountered each other across the Mashriq and the Maghrib without going through a state broadcaster or a Gulf newspaper, and first started writing, at length, to one another about politics and software and poetry and football.

Discovered through lobste.rs.