1503 comments from Ian Watkins' WhoDatedWho profile — 1428 posted before his arrest (19 December 2012) and 75 in the days just after — reconstructed from archived snapshots of the page. Each comment's original relative age (“2 yrs ago”) is replaced with an approximate real date; duplicates are collapsed, and comments later deleted from the live site are recovered where possible. Hover or tap any coloured date for its evidence.
The very start of the thread is missing — likely several dozen comments. The oldest one that survives already reads as a reply to earlier posts, but those opening comments predate the first usable archives and their content could not be recovered.
The original page only showed each comment's age relative to when it was viewed (“2 yrs ago”). The same comment was saved many times, on different dates, across a large set of archived snapshots. Comparing those readings — and catching the moment a label ticks over (e.g. “11 mths” → “1 yr”) — narrows each comment's real posting date to a window. A date box's colour shows how tight that window is; the small note under it is the margin. Hover a date to see every snapshot reading behind it.
Identifiable names are replaced with a tag like Woman A — hover it for who she is. Black marks a confident match (a distinctive alias or surname); dark red marks an uncertain one, such as a bare first name that could be someone else.
Any child is fully redacted with a solid black bar (███) — no label, no hover — along with any wording that would identify a child by family relationship. One of these redacted children is Woman A's infant son, whose name was posted in this thread in mid-2011 — more than a year before the arrest. The child Watkins was later convicted of abusing was named publicly here long before police acted.
External web links in comments are removed (shown as [link removed]), because a link or its address can lead to a page that names a victim.
Discussing his crimes — 111 comments that allude to or openly discuss the alleged crimes, read and tagged by hand.
Post-arrest (19–22 Dec 2012) — 75 comments posted in the days just after the arrest, kept separate from the pre-arrest thread. No archived comment is dated later than 22 Dec 2012 — the thread appears to have been closed to new comments within days.
✱ Deleted comment — 50 comments later deleted from the live site that survive only in earlier snapshots, identified from the archive's own comment ordering. Coverage is partial, so a few other deletions may exist that cannot be proven.
Use the filters below to show only the comments in any of these groups.
Joanne Mjadzelics, an on-and-off partner of Watkins, is referred to throughout the thread under names like “Jo”, “Majic” and “Nikki”. She repeatedly reported him to the police for child abuse — the first time in December 2008, four years before his arrest — but was not believed for years. She was herself later prosecuted over indecent images and acquitted, the jury accepting she had been gathering evidence to expose him.
When police ignored her reports she instead made her accusations publicly — much of which is detailed in this archive. Filter for Discussing Joanne and/or the pre-arrest Discussing his crimes comments to see.