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How do I save posts to text for storage?

Started by amy1, December 18, 2016, 01:31:11 PM

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amy1

Hello,

The owner of a Simple Machines board (2.0.2) has passed away and I am looking for a way to export his board posts to a text document. I am doing this because the board still has useful information and linked to.

But the SM software is old and there is no desire to keep the software up to date. I am looking to preserve the posts in any other way possible. Ideally, it would be exported to text so it can be easily searched with keywords.

Can anyone advise on how I can export the posts? I know the board has a lot of data there, but we have room on a local drive for storage.

Any advice or suggestions will be appreciated!

Amy

Colin

The easiest way would probably just be to create a instance running so you can use the search functionality of SMF, but if you insist on getting the data out you can use a tool like PHPMYADMIN (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/PhpMyAdmin) to export a SQL dump. Let us know if you have any other questions.
"If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody is not thinking." - Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

Colin

Kindred

In short, no... there is no way to export the posts to a text file...

What I did, when I shut down one of my systems, was take a backup of the database and install it on a wampp server running on my Local machine
Слaва
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting

Quote from: Kindred on December 18, 2016, 04:49:49 PM
In short, no... there is no way to export the posts to a text file...

What I did, when I shut down of my systems, was are a backup of the database and install it on a wampp server running on my Local machine

Yep, what he said, but it sounds like this fellow does not have access to the database, not sure...
Best Regards,
Bob Perry



"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it." Elbert Hubbard

Shambles

Probably easiest to enable & use the "Print" function on a topic.

amy1

Hi all, thanks for your input!

I actually do have access to the database itself at Dreamhost. So, I am going to look into this. Thanks, Colin, for the suggestion.

Printing each topic isn't feasible - there are hundreds of them.

I have no desire to keep the forum running - the key person who kept it running and vibrant has passed away - so it's back to my first option - if at all possible, to export the data into text, so I can save it as a PDF file, upload it to some website, and provide a public link to it so folks can download their own copy and search the posts with keywords.

Thanks, again.
Amy

Kindred

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

nend


aegersz

i wrote a batch php program to do this. command line access is required ... i'm just hopeless at php so this is all i could come up with.

it's a bit primitive but it allows admins help their members to get the data that want if they wish to unload their posts.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=548761

a last resort but it works.
The configuration of my Linux VPS (SMF 2.0 with 160+ mods & some assorted manual tweaks) can be found here and notes on my mods can be found here (warning: those links will take you to a drug related forum). My (House) music DJ dedication page is here

Colin

^ Actually a pretty good solution. Thanks Aegersz.
"If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody is not thinking." - Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

Colin

aegersz

you are too kind !

the idea is that if the forum should fold for some reason then users can request that their body of work be saved.
The configuration of my Linux VPS (SMF 2.0 with 160+ mods & some assorted manual tweaks) can be found here and notes on my mods can be found here (warning: those links will take you to a drug related forum). My (House) music DJ dedication page is here

devilkin

I've created a script that dumps the entire forum to html files. You can find it here: https://github.com/jdeluyck/scripts/tree/master/smf_forums
SMF 1.1.1, located at http://www.aelst.be/smf/

aegersz

The configuration of my Linux VPS (SMF 2.0 with 160+ mods & some assorted manual tweaks) can be found here and notes on my mods can be found here (warning: those links will take you to a drug related forum). My (House) music DJ dedication page is here

vbgamer45

In my GDPR helper I have the option for members to export their posts and data https://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=4183
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Sir Osis of Liver

If you're going to maintain a website for other purposes, why not install the forum as an archive (i.e., read only).  A couple of my regulars have done this, it preserves the forum in it's original format, makes it easy to access content.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

GigaWatt

Yes, but then you'd have to keep everything up to date and running... (PHP, SQL, etc.).

I've just tried the script, it worked but it doesn't support UTF-8 posts :S.
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

Arantor

Just before it says "here the fun starts...", try:

$conn->set_charset('utf8');

GigaWatt

Ummm... it kinda works :P.

The filenames are screwed up (expected) since the board names are also in Cyrillic, so I thought it worked before I downloaded the files, but... no dice, the post text is also screwed up... they're Cyrillic, just not in the correct code page :S.

Wait a minute. Just tried changing the character encoding to Unicode, it works :D.

The names of the files... meeeh, that part doesn't really matter ;). As I said, I though this might happen since it has to code the Cyrillic characters to conform to URL standards, so I kinda figured that out myself, LOL :D

Is there a way to force the character encoding to always be set as Unicode within the html file? (Open the html file, page encoding changes to Unicode/UTF-8.)
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

Arantor

Inside the <head> tag add <meta charset="UTF-8">

GigaWatt

Hmmm... wonder if I could embed this into the script... I'll definitely try :).

Thanks :).
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

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