NecroJoe
Stool Chef
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2005
- Messages
- 24,073
- Location
- San Francisco area, CA, USA
- Car(s)
- 2015 Mazda 3 S GT, 2015 VW e-Golf
I believe I posted about this in the "random thoughts" thread a while back, but the replies were over my head then, so I moved on without pursuing it any further. However, as of today, it's officially "do or die" time, and I'd appreciate any thoughts/advice I can get.
My favorite forum related to one of my hobbies is closing up shop at the end of this month. It's run by a manufacturer, and they are planning to simply let it vanish, and not archive any of it, when they disconnect from this old server (their new website has been totally re-vamped and on different servers, and they just want all of this to happen on social media rather than their (infrequently-visited) BBS, especially since their staff no longer really monitors it.
I was "leaked" the information about the closing, and it's got me really really down. My own posts make up just over 5% of all of the posts there despite only making up only .00659% of the user base.
I know nearly nothing about the back-end of a forum/bbs, but I know vBulletin and phpBB are two similar things, and I believe this forum is based on phpBB.
Question 1: As a non-admin (and without the admin's help), is there any way to archive this, even in a huge batch of text documents?
Question 2: Is something the admin could do that doesn't require much/any effort on their end, something that could make this way way way easier/faster/possible, what would I need to ask for specifically? Like, if what I want to do is literally impossible, or let's say if the only data I'd get would purely be HTML source code unless the admin flipped some "switch" or enabled some setting that meant the data could've much more useable, or downloaded more-automatically or faster...what would that look like?
The BBS dates back to 2007, and there are 392,003 total posts in 26,223 total topics, in case that helps figure out the scale of the job.
In my head, a GREAT end result would be a zip of 26,223 .txt documents, one for each topic, with all of the visible post info: titles, members, dates, and text body. If it could retain some formatting, even better. (With images? Even better better...but I assume that'd be impossible). Or if not a .zip, some sort of way to let a batch-download process run and save them all individually into a folder on my machine.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
My favorite forum related to one of my hobbies is closing up shop at the end of this month. It's run by a manufacturer, and they are planning to simply let it vanish, and not archive any of it, when they disconnect from this old server (their new website has been totally re-vamped and on different servers, and they just want all of this to happen on social media rather than their (infrequently-visited) BBS, especially since their staff no longer really monitors it.
I was "leaked" the information about the closing, and it's got me really really down. My own posts make up just over 5% of all of the posts there despite only making up only .00659% of the user base.
I know nearly nothing about the back-end of a forum/bbs, but I know vBulletin and phpBB are two similar things, and I believe this forum is based on phpBB.
Question 1: As a non-admin (and without the admin's help), is there any way to archive this, even in a huge batch of text documents?
Question 2: Is something the admin could do that doesn't require much/any effort on their end, something that could make this way way way easier/faster/possible, what would I need to ask for specifically? Like, if what I want to do is literally impossible, or let's say if the only data I'd get would purely be HTML source code unless the admin flipped some "switch" or enabled some setting that meant the data could've much more useable, or downloaded more-automatically or faster...what would that look like?
The BBS dates back to 2007, and there are 392,003 total posts in 26,223 total topics, in case that helps figure out the scale of the job.
In my head, a GREAT end result would be a zip of 26,223 .txt documents, one for each topic, with all of the visible post info: titles, members, dates, and text body. If it could retain some formatting, even better. (With images? Even better better...but I assume that'd be impossible). Or if not a .zip, some sort of way to let a batch-download process run and save them all individually into a folder on my machine.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
