Bluelight computer whizz alert! Technical question of great importance

Cornishman

Cornishman

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After seeing all too many bluelighters fallen by the wayside over the years. It has become an ongoing pursuit of close friends & relatives to 'gather' their loved one's posts from here on BL.

This post stems from having spoken to 'where wolfs?' mother today.
I'm sure you can appreciate a grieving parents want to be able to read their child's posts on here.

So, is there any way anyone could somehow gather a loved one's posts from here and perhaps save them to a disc?

Thank-you in advance.
 
Hey Cornishman. That's a really good question and I'm sure doing so would be a great thing for loved ones to have from those they lost.

I'm going to move this to Support, where they'll probably be better able to answer your question. Thank you for thinking of this. <3
 
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I may be able to help, I know a thing or two about programming for the web. If you search for all of their forum posts and add "&pp=200" to the URL it should give you 200 posts per page, you should be able to copy those into say, MS Word and keep the HTML formatting.

The only problem I can see is that it only gives you posts for the past month and a half or so. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's a setting by the administrators. I'm sure if you PM'd an admin asking for (at least temporary) permission to search all posts it would probably be possible. But eh, don't hang me up on that. It's my first post here thus I have no real clue, nor have I ever worked with vBulletin boards specifically. I was touched by your initiative and I couldn't not lend you whatever bit of knowledge I had available.
 
Technically, yeah, you could automate it, but you might piss off the admins if you did that. I dunno...depends on if it flags it as a DOS attempt. I imagine it won't make them too happy if you hit the server too much.
 
I never implied automating anything. You're only increasing the results per page for easier manual copying. :) But yeah, you still need to be able to get all the posts and not just the past couple of months, the board currently doesn't allow this.
 
Couldn't you just use the current Google search function? Input the username and it should pick up all posts by them (as well as those mentioning them, but that wouldn't be too hard to filter out). Obviously it would cause hassles if they used a common word as a username, but most should not cause a problem. Have to use the Google forum search though, not the forum-specific one as it just shows the thread title. Then you can just use a script to select the post and copy into another file, just find the end-tags of said post in the HTML script and copy everything in between.

Shouldn't be too difficult to write up in PHP on a separate website or localhost (your own computer running Xampp or similar, PHP reader). That way the only real "crawling" is done by the inbuilt search functions, minimizing the server load.

I would attempt it myself but its been about 5 years since I played with code, pity because it sounds like a nice little challenge.
 
The way that I prefer to do it is to click on the persons profile, and then click on "find latest posts" which is on the left side. That gives you only their posts in order of most recent, as does clicking on their username in a post of theirs and then selecting the "view forum posts" link.

Using the 'Advanced Search' on the top right and then typing the username (while ticking the "exact name" box) you can select to find either the latest posts or the latest threads by the user. The only issue with that though is it gives the results based on the most recent post by anybody in the thread, and not just the person whose posts you are trying to find.

Here is Where Wolfs profile page if it helps.
 
Silveren said:
Couldn't you just use the current Google search function? Input the username and it should pick up all posts by them (as well as those mentioning them, but that wouldn't be too hard to filter out). Obviously it would cause hassles if they used a common word as a username, but most should not cause a problem. Have to use the Google forum search though, not the forum-specific one as it just shows the thread title. Then you can just use a script to select the post and copy into another file, just find the end-tags of said post in the HTML script and copy everything in between.

Shouldn't be too difficult to write up in PHP on a separate website or localhost (your own computer running Xampp or similar, PHP reader). That way the only real "crawling" is done by the inbuilt search functions, minimizing the server load.

I would attempt it myself but its been about 5 years since I played with code, pity because it sounds like a nice little challenge.
Click to expand...

Automating off of Google Search will get your IP banned.
 
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