Copying an entire message board

[Bad2DaBone]

If I wanted to make a duplicate copy of a message board and all that's on it for safe-keeping, what program would be the best one to use?

[Broomie]

Some forums can do it all for you but the manual way is to export the database either through the forum, cpanel or phpMyAdmin and then download the contents of the forum via FTP and the next step is to import the old database into the new forum. There's quite a lot more to it then that alone so you can check out this guide below. Even if you don't have SMF it works pretty much the same as every other forum.


http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Backup

[Orion]

Yes, but is there a way to do so without access to the cPanel?

[Bad2DaBone]

http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport


If nobody here has the answer, those dudes might.


Additionally, you could check Something Awful's message boards as well. 

[sickfiction]

Some sort of forum spider?

[Collector]

Without access to the database nothing is very acceptable short of manual saving of each page of each thread and a lot of fixing after the fact. It is a big part of why the Wayback machine is lousy at capturing message boards. I will admit that it has been a while since I have looked for anything, but I doubt that there has been any big advances, especially with the decline of the popularity of forums.

[Orion]

Without access to the database nothing is very acceptable short of manual saving of each page of each thread and a lot of fixing after the fact. It is a big part of why the Wayback machine is lousy at capturing message boards. I will admit that it has been a while since I have looked for anything, but I doubt that there has been any big advances, especially with the decline of the popularity of forums.

That's what I thought too.  I was hoping there'd be some sort of 'crawler' to run that saved it, even in TXT format, but no luck finding one.

[Bad2DaBone]

Copying all the html might take a while but, turn on some music cd's and you can while away the time and have a bit of fun as well at the same time.

Some of the more tech-savy places (Reddit) may have a special hack for this though.

[Broomie]

So you're trying to copy an entire message board without access to the FTP or Database? Yeah, if you want every page intact you're going to have to save each page manually or use a web capture tool like Chrome' Fireshot to save the entire page as an image. Without access to the database, no spider or program could process this for you effectively - and I only mean legitimately, not by hacking or unauthorized access. As Collector says this is why some threads work and some don't, they can't target every forum thread and as all forum information and text is saved on a database you sometimes just get mySQL errors instead of content.

[Collector]

You will also have to manually fix all of the links between pages if you want to be able to navigate the threads. I think you are underestimating the amount of work this will take.

[Klytos]

These forums have over 1000 threads and if that thread is more than one page, and a lot of them are, that's a separate save as well. Yeah, it'd be possible to just save each page but bugger that for a joke.

[Orion]

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of.  I'm no stranger to coding/webpage BS, but even I'm not up for something like that.  Especially for a forum as massive/old as the one we're looking at.  (Not a hard guess which we're talking about)

[Klytos]

I found this thread, might have something that could work.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=1761395

[Broomie]

Hmm, looks interesting but according to the instructions you still need access to the admin account. I think this is just if you don't have access to the database. Not had a chance to look through it completely as I'm at work but it does look like a normal forum converter so you'll need to have an empty forum with a database set up to retrieve the information. I used one of these to go from our Invision Boards to SMF many years ago. Certainly needed admin access for that!

[Orion]

Yeah, I downloaded it, it that seems more for those who either have a corrupted backup or FTP access isn't 100% reliable.  You still need cpanel access to use those.  Also looks like basic Python knowledge is required.  Both of which I'm lacking.  Gonna continue looking around *shrugs*

[Collector]

Why bother with the whole board? Just try to save the few threads that really matter to you?

[Orion]

Well, it's Bad2DaBone's idea, I'm just trying to help with it.

Also, because of a backup, due to instability of the actual admin.

Most of the stuff I'd personally want to keep is in the fanfiction part.  Any other stuff is discussions that would be nice to read through for nostalgia sake, but other than reminiscing on past fun, serve no purpose.