Kash it isn't that simple. The HTML generated by vbulletin is dynamic, and the actual content is stored in a database. Having the archive is good though, because it can probably still be scraped in the future to format all the necessary content into files the database can read. . .

. . .Anyway, no point in making people work too hard on this.

The forums are already being archived.
We also have a script running that can grab all the forum content and convert it into files that can be inserted into the new forums database. The only caveat is that we used TAOs archive to do this, so we can't regenerate quotes, images, videos, etc.

Right now we are working on building a script that can scrape through the actual forums quickly enough to grab all of the information we need to actually regenerate quotes and other stuff like that.

My awkward post in the bug thread was so that I could get a look at how the database stores smileys and quotes and stuff in the database, so we can reformat the data we are scraping from the old forums.

Don't go around talking about this on the old forums.