Is there....

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 Our mobile skin is a bit out of date, that may be part of the problem.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.

Looking back, I sounded somewhat nitpicky, far more than I intended to. The program is excellent, and would recommend it to anybody wishing to save their posts.

The quote thing, as I said, is entirely my fault, it was a mere warning for new members who might use the program later on.
And the ordering by threads is in many ways superior to ordering by date. Maybe since every post contains a date, there is another way to order them by date not necessarily included in this particular program. But that doesn’t really matter.

I figured it was the user-agent causing that, yes - FUPS provides a URL for its user-agent. I’d prefer not to spoof because I think it’s good etiquette to let webmasters know that a bot’s accessing their site, along with a link to more info on the bot. As I said, I’ve not seen this behaviour on any other phpBB board before.

I wouldn’t presume to know why your web server’s so sluggish, but one thing you can do if you haven’t already to dramatically improve PHP speed is to enable opcode caching. Chances are high that you’ve already done that though. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, there really should be other output options, I’ve been aware of that for a while now, and your comment gave me the kick in the pants that I needed to finally implement them. I wrote the original script out of which this one evolved for a friend who paid me to write it, so I simply coded the output as he personally wanted it. Now that the script is publicly available, it should cater to different personal preferences.

Here’s the new success screen:

Again, anyone who for some strange reason wants to see the changes I made to the code to get this working can view the commit on GitHub; it’s commit f85211594d7ecd4c71fd3aa70c981ce2845d40cf.

One way to solve this problem (and offer a useful feature in general) would be to provide an option to download the entirety of each thread in which the user was involved. Someone else has asked for this feature already, I just haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet.

The other missing feature of which I’m keenly aware is image scraping.

No worries. If I’m going to offer a script, I might as well offer one that works, otherwise I’m not really offering anything at all.

Hey, no need to second-guess yourself, you were totally right about the need for more output options. But I do appreciate your positive comments, so, thanks.

If anyone has any further feedback, or any other suggestions, please let me know.