Beast's Lair Archival Status

[Doctor_Blood]

The Internet Archive does what they can, but there's no guarantee that they'll exist a decade or two from now. In that light, I try to keep personal backups of sites that I might want to look back on twenty or thirty years from now.

I'm unfamiliar with the vBulletin backend - how difficult would it be to make a tar of the public-facing part of the website? Essentially, a dump of everything that can be seen as a guest on the forum - stripping out PMs, user information, and so on.

If that's unfeasible, a script to archive specific threads would take care of most of what I care about; I think Calibre has a plugin that can grab from Xenforo - I could look into seeing if it can be made to work with vBulletin.

[aldeayeah]

Simply iterating over https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/<number>/page<number> would get you most of the content.

I once half wrote a python script using BeautifulSoup that would just dump of BL's text content into a yuge structured text file

I even managed to make it login as myself IIRC? I'll look around, see if I can find it

i was going to use it to be able to easily search the forum, as the integrated search is such a piece of shit

[mAc Chaos]

I am not sure about a front end option, but we have a back end cron job that makes a SQL dump of the forum daily going back 30 days. If the forum croaks but the server's still available, we'll have that as an option to restore everything.

Feel free to back up what you want in your own time though for your own purposes.