thorr-kan wrote:There is a concerted effort to archive the forums and the old d20 content being made through the
http://www.giantitp.com forums.
Please would you post the link to the place/topic where this is being discussed/organised.
enderxenocide0 wrote:I pooled together the collective knowledge of my friends and I in the software dev business and we're currently testing an application that lets us go through a forum and save all the content to a local hard drive, making it fully browsable offline. Once we're sure it works properly in the next few days, we'll share it with the community so anyone can back up a forum in full. It won't have search capabilities unless someone makes one for it, since Wizards is unlikely to release their database to us. What you do with the content once it's stored locally is up to you. If nothing else, it gives us an infinite amount of time to move content to new forums. We would be no longer constrained by time. I'll keep you all posted on the progress.
That's great.
I also have a friend on Facebook who is attempting the same sort of thing. He said he is trying to make something called MAFF files. Obviously both of you (and anyone else attempting it) only have a fixed amount of time to catch things before WotC pull down the original source.
I would suggest you do testing on a long multipage topic (like the Commoner Campaign topic) to see if your app can cope with something like that that is a bit weird.
I'm guessing that your app is probably going to be PC based (which will mean that I probably won't be able to use it) but perhaps you can work with the data afterwards and convert that into some useable form.
If you think you could make a fully hyperlinked browsable archive, perhaps we could talk to Ashtagon about the possibility of creating an archive on The Piazza. I would like to be able to import topics into The Piazza somehow (as I have been doing with the Spelljammer topics) as that would allow WotC conversations to be reactivated.
(I've been trying to do one Piazza post per WotC post, to give me the theoretical ability to give a post back to the original poster...assuming I can confirm that it is the same person. In theory that could mean that we could capture all of Keith Baker's Eberron topics/posts, with your app, eventually get them transferred to the Eberron forum at The Piazza and then eventually get them transferred over to his Piazza account, so that he could edit and update things, if necessary. But that would probably be something that got finished a year or more after the WotC forum was gone.)
willpell wrote:Does anyone on this board care enough about Magic to take care of those forums in this way?
I would strongly advise you to get in touch with M:tG communities as soon as possible. There are only 15 days left. You could perhaps act as a middleman, helping them to get a copy of Ender's app, but don't wait for him. If he gets into technical difficulties and runs out of time, they might not have time to come up with their own solution. The sooner you can get the word out, the more chance there is that a M:tG fan can come up with an automated solution to save their content and get it hosted on a M:tG or CCG fansite.
And if they are already ahead of us, perhaps you could return here with news of a fully working archive system.
enderxenocide0 wrote:If I get the time, I'll be happy to do it with any and every WotC forum (but don't necessarily rely on me as my priority will be Eberron first and I have limited time in the coming weeks).
If you can save the entire Eberron forum, that would be awesome. It is the second largest campaign setting forum at the WotC forums, and it would be impossible to grab it using the copy and paste technique I've used to save about 20 percent of the Spelljammer topics.
You are doing a great thing. Thank you! If you
are able to go beyond Eberron and save the rest of the campaign setting area...and then the entire D&D area...that would be a
major contribution to D&D fandom. But I would expect you to look after Eberron first.
Keep up the good work. And good luck!
