Just wondering, but how much is paid yearly for the ad-less pagecounter? If Bob can set up a way for us to donate money to him for the forums, would that be cheaper than paying for views here?

It's not the cost of keeping the forums up here. It's the fact that they're going to shove the forums into a platform (tapatalk) that nobody really likes, and damn the consequences of that.

Quote:robkelk wrote:

---

Quote:Inquisitive Raven wrote:

---

It occurs to me that you might not want to move the content in this forum or the Website forum. ...

We don't want to move any content. However,

Okay, let me specify that a bit further. A move controlled by Bob and not Tapatalk would not need to keep the old content of the two tech support boards. There will, of course, need to be tech support boards, but they can go forward with all new content as new problems arise.
As to the choice of forum software, I like having hierarchical links at both the top and bottom of the page like the current forums and Xenforo. vBulletin only has them at the top. I'd also like to have the forum software not forget that I've read a thread a week or two after I've read it and drop me back at the beginning when I click the new messages link. I suppose there's no getting around having threads marked read to the end after they've aged past a certain point.
I couldn't care less if there's any kind of voting system, but if there is one, I rather like the way it's handled on SV's implementation of Xenforo. At the very least, having the "hugs" option gives you a way to express sympathy by upvoting without coming across as if you think the horrible thing in the post being upvoted is in any way desirable.

Let me know if I need to write something to extract the content.  We probably have a few people capable of programming it here, but I've got some experience moving large amounts of user contributed data to a new site.
-- ∇×V

vorticity Wrote:Let me know if I need to write something to extract the content.  We probably have a few people capable of programming it here, but I've got some experience moving large amounts of user contributed data to a new site.

I believe Ankhani still has the crawls that you'd be extracting the data from.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Ankhani: send me an email at bslaabs@gmail.com Let me see a sample of what your data looks like. I'm glad you got it before the change!
-- ∇×V

Wulp. It's happened.

So how far along are we to making this move happen?

I think Bob needs to get his connection issues here sorted out first.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Is Bob having internet-in-general issues, or just this-forum issues?

Because under the circumstances, we might need to consider that it could take months for them to fix it, if it's just the forum...

-Morgan.

Nah, from what I heard it was issues with being able to log into his account for Tapatalk (nee Yuku).

wrote: Wrote:Is Bob having internet-in-general issues, or just this-forum issues?

Yes.

But his current inability to use FTP only affects posting fanfics to his website. His inability to login to the forums means he has to coordinate this project by remote (or through email).
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Turns out, I should have been watching more carefully if I had looking at local or live material while testing. The individual forum scrapes dutifully copied all the thread lists, but due to the way threads were organized under /topic/<name> and not /forum/<forumname>/<topicname> it treated the thread links as external and didn't pull them, only linked to live pages. I probably should have been suspicious with how fast they completed.

Nevertheless, I still have the partial/aborted backup from before with the most recent/dated content. Which is better than nothing, but it's likely not going to help much. Still, there is nothing preventing me from simply doing the same with the way things are now, it looks as though all the essential content remains, even if the presentation is changed.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

It looks like some html is broken (and it appears to try to change links to twitter to embeds that don't actually work?), but that'll probably just mean the data will take more massaging before it can be imported somewhere else. I don't know whether we'd have any particular use for a partial from the old format or not. (Sounds like a question for vorticity?)

Unless I'm missing something, it's probably safe to just grab everything under the drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com subdomain.

-Morgan.

Can the forums be scraped again, though, now that it's tapatalk? I'd imagine that we'd want to try anyways to get the stuff that's been posted since the last scrape before we migrate.

Can't imagine why not.

-Morgan.

I've updated the max-link-scan count to avoid the previous panic-quit and can begin again at your leisure. It will probably take several days to do a complete crawl.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

Can you add a delay between page loads, so that it doesn't look like a scrape?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

I can add delays after downloading X bytes. Same idea.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

Blargh. I'm getting 500 errors. :p

What BA said. I must say, the quality of service is rapidly going downhill. I do not believe I shall dine here again.

wrote: Wrote:Blargh. I'm getting 500 errors. :p

I would get 500 errors
And I would get 500 more
Just to see the data on this forum
Show up on somewhere else's board

Okay, so I'm not much of a filker... <g>
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

wrote: Wrote:Thank you, Ankhani! Next comes the choice of board software and where we host it... and once's that's determined, we can take a shot at importing the archive.

Emails from Bob:

Quote:Speaking of which... After going through Wikipedia's "comparison offorum software" page, visiting sites and trying demos where available,I've decided that I'll still be going with my initial choice, MyBB.

Quote:NetCarrier tells me that not only do they provide MySQL and PHPsupport (both needed by MyBB), I also apparently have no storagelimit on my website, so 3.5 gigs of back data is not a problem.

This means we now have a planned target platform, which we needed to know for data conversion.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Well, let's cross our fingers and see what happens.

Ankhani Wrote:I've updated the max-link-scan count to avoid the previous panic-quit and can begin again at your leisure. It will probably take several days to do a complete crawl.

. . Ankhani, I've just sent you a PM regarding this. . .

EDIT: Why is the text formatting showing up as plain text? Sigh...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

And I'm back.  It only took Tapatalk a week to tell me the login info I needed.  (Measuring from their first response to me, which took a week itself after my first support ticket.)

I note that even though I'm the admin, I don't seem to have any thread control powers -- possibly I have to set something in the board config.  But you would think I'd be able to delete threads (like the pinned one in this board about a now-obsolete Yuku feature) right out of the box.  (EDIT:  I am.  I just actually have to go into the topic to find the option, unlike the topic tools we used to have at the board level.)

Anyway, regardless of my return, I'm still aiming to move the forums to my website, as I've been relaying through Rob.  (Speaking of whom, thank you for your somewhat involuntary role as my mouthpiece this last couple weeks!)  I'll keep folks up to date on the state of this process; right now, I've got MyBB uploaded on my website, and as soon as I get the MySQL info I need from my ISP, I'll get that fully installed and initialized.  After that, it's just a matter of figuring out how to port the board backups into it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.