Forums closing at the end of January - Alternatives?

I'm glad to see there's some information archival efforts being made.

As it happens, I've been working on some thread archival/revival efforts on another XenForo forum intermittently over the years, and that effort has sped up in January. Which means that I wrote a program for archiving XenForo threads, including images, and just in the past week or so enhanced it to be able to iterate through forums (it's been able to do threads for awhile).

So I fired it up, found there are a few differences at NBR but largely it worked, and have started making some archives. I've posted my archive of the Dell Inspiron 1520 Viable After Market Upgrade thread here. The CSS is wrong as it's from a different site (I archived that manually and just copy it to each archive), but the important thing, the content, is being archived.

At least initially, as I finish things I'll upload them to https://ajtjp.com/NBR/ . However, I only have a few gigs of space left on that server, so I expect to have to come up with a new solution before long.

Thanks to Aaron44126 posting the timeout interval, I have a 1.1 second pause between pages and that's working. I'm starting out with the Microsoft manufacturer forum as that's a small one to make sure it's working properly.

My archiver code lives at https://hg.sr.ht/~adj/storyarchiver (it uses Mercurial for source control). No idea about the relative merits versus the methods others have been using, but it's been running against XenForo for awhile. It'll optionally log some stats to a SQLite database (thread name, starter, start date, replies, views, automatically made great again Photobucket embeds, and broken links in the thread); there's a DDL to create that database in the code base, Database directory. It runs on Java 11+, and has a GUI for configuration, though the database location has to be configured in code. Other than the database, it should work out-of-the-box in Java 11+, though it has only ever been run by two people so no guarantees there.

If there are specific threads you want to archive, set it to Forum Mode -> Whole Thread, and it'll save it locally in HTML format for you.

Picture:

 

... and the Microsoft threads are backed up: https://ajtjp.com/NBR/Manufacturers/Microsoft/ Find the thread by title, there's only 55 of them. And while the screenshot above reported the wrong number of posts, I verified via the logs that all 794 posts are backed up. The 393 is a UI/progress estimation issue that has since been fixed.

I'm now downloading the HP Business Class sub-forum, since I have an HP EliteBook.

I may have missed it while skimming this thread, but it's probably best to coordinate who is archiving which sections. I'm definitely interested in Dell, but it looks like that's already well underway.

I'm also thinking about the news articles, i.e. the main page reviews (http://forum.notebookreview.com/forums/notebook-news-and-reviews.13/). That's a great source of knowledge, but is in a format that my program is not currently able to archive in an automated fashion, since it links out to article pages.

 

By the looks of it, the entire forum is already mirrored on archive.org. Access js painfully slow though, and the copy is somewhat dated.

 

Is it really the entire forum though? When I load https://web.archive.org/web/*/forum.notebookreview.com/forums*, it says "4,364 URLs have been captured for this URL prefix". But there are a few hundred thousand threads at NBR, many of which have tens or hundreds of replies... I'd expect there to be over a million URLs captured if everything were backed up.

I hope you are right, but I'd have to see more evidence to be convinced.

Edit: 650,170 threads at NBR, adding up the forum counts in Windows calculator. That's a lot of threads.

 

Someone from here has started a new forum at laptopforum.net

 

Oh no! The troll has lost his home

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/please-join-laptopforum-net.837560/page-2

 

I am as saddened as everyone else that the forums are closing. As far as I am concerned they are the only forums where there is an abundance of knowledge and zero hate or petty fights, squabbles that seem so common elsewhere. It really is the best source of information if you really want to know about a particular laptop.

I appreciate the efforts being made by Aaron especially, this section is where I spend most of my time when on DPR. I am sure a lot of people are going to try and set up new domains/forums to try and attract the potential traffic, but it is not that easy.

Let me know if I can help in anyway. I do have some space on my server, though not sure what type of traffic this Dell section gets. Anyway, please keep me informed and I will be checking back too.

 

If that owner wants that forum to have any traffic at all, the first thing it needs to do is host all the downloads that people are creating...

 

I think that the archives and the new forum should not be hosted in the same place. It's disappointing that we won't be able to carry all of the existing knowledge forward directly but it is the best way to go to avoid any copyright issues from TT, IMO, and it should also not look like we are making money off of the archives (if the new forum features ads or any sort of donations). Linking back to archived threads from the new forum should be fine though. I also don't see a problem if individual members want to re-post guides or other content that they have created in a new location.