How to archive forum threads safely & efficiently?

[BIL]

Chaps, I think I am dying... of cheeto dust inhalation. Before I go out to the store for cough syrup, I wish to archive our Ninja Gaiden / Scrolling Action thread and if possible the Mega Drive one, because both are great big heaving muhfuckas with stacks and stacks of content I'm still referring back to (if not reading afresh) today!

HOWEVER I don't know how to do so, AND I am very wary of jamming up the server or something! All I know is hotlinking images = bad, or something. Sorry, I am kind of dumb and getting on a bit.

So, might there be some tools or website for the task? If you could advise me of how to back up a thread without promptly getting myself banned for being a complete and utter asshole, I'd be very grateful!

Regs Biruford

[BIL]

[Ed Oscuro]

I can't speak for administration of course, but those images should mostly be linked from external sites, and your browser will already have site data cached. It's just down to how much data is being pulled down from the server for each page, probably not too much. I haven't been posting 50 times a day so that should help too

[BIL]

Ah, good point about cache and external links. To be honest I'd be happy as a clam with even a raw text dump of the NG thread, but that does hearten me a bit on a complete capture. Some fervent (and instructive!) GIFFin' going on in there.

This endeavour was really prompted by a vanishingly rare server issue we had a few months back, which ate a couple posts in the NG thread... if it'd occurred during the brutal Howling-esque growth spurt / werewolf transformation of early 2017, I'd have been mildly bummed! Maybe I should just archive kitten's post history. >_>

I guess I could printscreen together the NG thread, if it comes down to that. It's for the children!

[BryanM]

You mean saving a backup copy locally to your computer?

From what light googling on this I've done displaying an entire topic on one page would require a server side script change to viewtopic.php. The uh... powers that be haven't implemented the crucial [s]strikeout[/s] upgrade yet, so that avenue is probably doomed.

Eh... I could whip up an executable that may or may not work on your version of Windows, that can open dozens of pages at a time, so saving them is just a matter of spamming ctrl+s, enter, then ctrl+w over and over a couple hundred times. I'm sure there's absolutely some way to automate those button presses (or the procedures they call), but it's never been high enough of a personal priority for me to spend the hours working out the wizard ways to do that one highly specific thing...

[BIL]

You mean saving a backup copy locally to your computer?

Yup! Similar to what (I think) moozooh did with CAVE-STG.com when it went down.

Being an emotionless murder machine, I'm totally down for manually archiving individual pages, not an issue - actually, that's a prime opportunity to listen to some new albums I've been putting off for the last year. Just don't wanna blow up the server, somehow. Probably wouldn't happen but I'm sure the fates are watching this thread with amusement.

I'll probably just PM comrade BLOODF to be safe.

Wait a minute...

OMG

I CAN PROBABLY PM MOOZOOH TO ASK HIS ADVICE

(but I'm not sure how often he's around! and it could get awkward if he disliked my "1980s russkie spy" act in the GG thread! I save wodka for him just in case )

Ta BryanM, that is a good lead!

[drauch]

DOIN' GOD'S WORK.

[BIL]

Thankyou CMDR drauch ;-;7

[ED-057]

Eh... I could whip up an executable that may or may not work on your version of Windows, that can open dozens of pages at a time, so saving them is just a matter of spamming ctrl+s, enter, then ctrl+w over and over a couple hundred times. I'm sure there's absolutely some way to automate those button presses

If you can reduce it to a series of keypresses then you can use Autohotkey to automate the process.

Or you could generate a series of URLs and feed them all to WGET.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54859&start=6360
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54859&start=6390
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54859&start=6420
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54859&start=6450
etc.

The man page for WGET is a mile long these days. It probably has an option to download images and change all the links to point to the local copies.

[BIL]

Nice, thanks! Glad I bumped this.