Archive mode

[RicochetPeter]

Hi,
I would like to be able to put forum sites into "archive" or memorial mode, whatever you may call it.

• Logins disabled
• Registration disabled (I know this is already possible)
• Posting disabled
• Really minimalist simple "text-only/table" layout, possibly without css/js/whatever/images (maybe thumbs only?)/videos

These are the things that come to my mind when a forum is no longer active, but would be good to keep online for reference.

My search for such a function mostly turned out to something like exporting the forum into html files with wget or similar tools, which is not very convenient, considering the huge amount of disk space required for larger forums.

If anyone have a tool at hand that would iterate through the database and export everything to really simple html files while maintaining the forum's structure somehow, that would also be a solution. I'm not a dev, only on the admin side of things...

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

It's quite literally not possible, without a lot of effort. The contents you want to present and preserve, do not exist without SMF pulling data from the database first and combining and formatting it in to what you see. So in order to create it, you really need to do something like programmatically scraping the forum and saving the results in to a format you want. (Basically either by reading from SMF, or recreating what SMF does. )

You can turn off registrations and set all boards to read only, take away all unnecessary permissions like private messaging, and you will have an archive forum.
But it will still be a fully functional forum, just with limited permissions.

[Antechinus]

Well, you could do the rest with basic presentation, or removal of it. If you get rid of the CSS you will have a basic HTML display, if that is really what is wanted. Not sure there's any great benefit in it.

[live627]

a nice text only view of this thread by clicking the 'print' button https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=printpage;topic=589298.0

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Well yeah, if you accept that you still need to maintain the PHP&MySQL behind it, it's mostly doable with SMF as is.
But I kinda read that like the aim would be a static webpage only, but still organized to categories and topics..

[Antechinus]

a nice text only view of this thread by clicking the 'print' button https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=printpage;topic=589298.0

Cool. All you have to do is print the entire site.
Which I suppose you could automate via a script, if you were keen enough. My guess is that is basically how "archive mode" is done anyway.