Elaborate or shut the hole.
just give the site sources to jailbird, he will fix it in no time. sure.
You can dig out real names, addresses, you can find out various private info and connections, a lot of stuff that was visible and was erased can be found in logs. So (in my opinion) you can't just give anybody access to raw database and code.
so you are a masochist eh? cant help then, i guess.
You can't imagine how many times I wanted to say fuck you to the person that had downvoted me, and ask him, why the fuck you hate me? I don't even know you? But I haven't approached him once! Coz that't the burden of being trusted user.
for just fooling around with the code you dont need the db at all....
and there is an (oldish) copy of the db with all the sensitive stuff cleaned out right on the svn.... oh well
however, to do significant changes you WILL have to rewrite significant portions of the code, there is simply too much monkey patched and hardcoded shite going on. which is pretty much the reason for why some supposedly easy to add stuff was never added :)
Are you talking about some internal stuff? Because this is the first time I read about this.
According to my experience, it is probably easier and less time consuming to fix/update/maintain old code than to rewrite everything from scratch. Unless it is really really really shitty spagetti.