Is there....

some kind of program for saving forum posts?

I want to save all of my old posts, so I can read them when I want and get to know my thinking processes in the past. PhilosophyForums has a nice little function that allows you to download all posts of a user to a .txt file, is there a program which does the similar thing, preferably in word or PDF since the function is absent?

ILP won’t be here forever, so in case it shuts down, I’d rather have my posts some place safe. Omnia mea mecum porto is the proverb I think.

Please prohibit this function for my posts. I pretended to be Taz (Barbarian Horde) in my first 150ish posts, convincing him I was him (and I succeeded), I really don’t want people trying to get all my posts together and trying to figure out what my system was… I don’t post that way. I respond… to a billion different highly varied questions, and have adapted my rhetorical methods over time to fit the forum.

If you just saw my posts alienated from all the other posts active on the site, you wouldn’t end up with a book, but a schizophrenic mess. You need context too, sometimes larger than just the thread, but what everyone is talking about in other threads that given day too… sometimes I tie it all together. My responses target a culture at that time, on the forums.

I would feel icky if someone got the bright idea of only looking at my posts, spread out over years. They are 2000 separate letters to many people.

If you want a book, email me, and we can have a book long, topic specific discussion. I just don’t want to see all my posts stored on another site congealed together. I never surrendered my copyright, always insisted I owned it. I’m comfortable with it being in threads, but not in a file given merged into a congealed lump. It will misrepresent me out of context. It changes the nature of the work. Much easier to misconstrue. I prefer having context, the people I am conversing with… dated to compare to other threads… with access to those other threads.

I just want to preserve my own posts you narcissist, relax :laughing:

I agree there should be a way to do this, but currently there isn’t. I’d like to implement that function, although a possible issue is that, as the database grows, users downloading their entire posing history could actually put more strain on the server than it can handle (or bump us over our outbound traffic limit). We’re a pretty rinky-dink little operation here.

I promise that I’ll implement something like that well before ILP shuts down (unless I die unexpectedly, in which case all bets are off). I’m a packrat for my own writings, so I appreciate the desire to have a backup of anything you’ve spent some time on.

This retrieves posts from a PHPBB forum:
creativeandcritical.net/fups/ent … type=phpbb

theabsolute.net/phpBB/viewto … =17&t=7230

:-k That script doesn’t seem to work.

Please don’t use scripts like that. They will have an effect on the serve similar to a denial of service attack, because they work by making repeated requests for posts from the server. 6800 odd requests will make the site unusable for quite some time.

If you must use that kind of script, please use it between 3 am and 4 am Eastern time, preferably on a Sunday or Monday, as that is when traffic to the site is lowest.

The programmer thought of that :

Hi,

I’m the author of the FUPS script which phyllo linked to. I found my way to this thread by following my web server’s referrer log after receiving emails notifying me of FUPS errors. Hopefully, those errors are now fixed. The problem was that for some reason (I’ve not seen this before), this forum was returning pages to FUPS using a “mobile” skin, which up until now FUPS hadn’t supported. After adding support, it seems to be working. If you have any more problems, please feel free to let me know either in this thread or through my website.

Best wishes,
Laird

P.S. In case anyone’s interested (I’m not sure why you would be), you can see the changes I made to get things working in commit 6cc21778277578a8c07dec13ebb35c645cad85b5 in the project’s GitHub records.

Hey Laird, thanks for chiming in. Our mobile skin is a bit out of date, that may be part of the problem. But it should still be the case for any phpBB board that the mobile skin is served based on useragent, spoofing a common desktop browser should get you the regular site.

And I appreciate that steps are taken to space out requests, that makes me much more open to the use of this script. I’d still request that it be used in off hours if possible (any morning before about 10am eastern), because the server creaks under a normal load and a thousand requests, even spaced out, is much higher than normal load. But it is totally unreasonable that a thousand requests over an hour would tax the server, so I will put the blame on myself if anyone is unable to schedule around it.

Carleas, are you self-hosted?
Have you considered aws, or is that too mmuchout of your own pocket?
Speaking of that, you should do a little fund raiser. I’m sure at least a handful of folks here would be willing to send some money your way.

ILP runs on a VPS, I don’t know if that qualifies as self hosted: I don’t touch the hardware, but I control all the software.

I looked at AWS, but the VPS we use is awesome, their prices are reasonable and their support is great. Plus, since it’s a smaller provider, they have a great mailing list of much more experienced server admins who love to tell me all the things I don’t know, and that’s invaluable. For a site this size and an admin of my skill level, AWS doesn’t compare.

And cost isn’t a problem. We do have a Paypal account for donations, but it’s mostly demands on my time (and my own laziness and fear of breaking things) that holds up maintenance and development. I’m getting some more time as I settle in to my schedule, so expect a little more activity on that front.

I have not tried the application yet, but since I am unsure about Carleas’s honesty, I will not rest my posting history on his promise of making such a function before the end of ILP.

An alternative easy and quick way of saving your posts is to download the program “DropBox” and then you just go over your post and click the screenshot button (PrintScreen). You can do 1 post per 1-2 seconds this way.

I’ll try to use the application before doing that tho, has anybody had any success with it so far?

Sorry, I think my last post was unclear for trying too hard to be clever:

Feel free to use the script. If possible use it mornings before ~10 and avoid afternoons ~14-19 (all times eastern US, UTC-4). But if you can’t work in that schedule, you have my blessing to use it whenever.

I do intend to add such a function, but there’s no need to wait on me.

There has been few members active today, so I did it. Took 2h35min10s overall for my number of posts (about 2200).

I could have simply tried it out by downloading from a user with 1-10 posts… but I only remembered that half-way through, so I let it complete.

It’s arranged in an alphabetical order of topics you’ve posted in.

A screenshot of how it looks like once you’re done:

Does this mean that you are happy with the result?

Would you recommend it to another user who wants to download his posts?

Yeah it’s decent, one drawback IMO: - It doesn’t allow the option to sort your posts by date

Another thing which I don’t like, but is entirely my fault, is that I don’t know who posted the posts which I replied to and quoted, but like

, without the name of who I am quoting. So I see what I was responding to, but I don’t know to whom I was responding to. But, as I said, this is entirely my fault and I only mention this as a precaution for other, newer users, not to screw themselves over if they intend to use this nifty little gadget.

Okay, something for Laird to consider.

Otherwise, a satisfied customer.

Thank you to Laird for coming here and fixing some problems with the program. :smiley:

Not sure if Laird can help. The quoting isn’t actually a pointer to the quoted post, it’s just formatting markup. You can attribute a quote box to anyone:

I meant a different order besides alphabetical. It could be ordered by original post date.