Looking for the old forums?

Discussion on topics that aren't specifically related to current FASA product lines or don't fit elsewhere.
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Mataxes
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Looking for the old forums?

Post by Mataxes » Sun Nov 27, 2016 9:03 pm

As mentioned in the welcome post, we needed to set up new, clean forums in order to fix some security issues and prevent other things from opening portals to other planets (we prefer that to stay in our games, thank you very much).

We did archive the old forums. There's a link off the main FASA Games page, but here's a direct link:

http://fasagames.com/archiveforum/

You can still sign in there with your old forum username and password, but you can't post anything. We're not sure just yet how long they will stay, so if there is anything in there you want to save, best to take care of that sooner rather than later.

Of course, feel free to start new threads on the old subjects. Don't let the conversations die just because we remodeled the game room!
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The Undying
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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by The Undying » Mon Nov 28, 2016 12:29 am

Can we please find a better way to handle the loss of the old forum? I can't speak to the other communities, but the Earthdawn folks I think very much used the forum as a repository for knowledge, including a fairly lengthy errata on currently printed products. Loss of that information is going to be very unfortunate and, as diplomatically as I can put it, a bit of a disservice to the community and customers since these are products FASA is currently printing.

I can think of a variety of poor ways of maintaining the knowledge that would take a bit of time and programmatics. Each thread could be effectively printed to PDF, with an archive of all the PDFs made available (preferably in the raw - not compressed - so that search engines can index them). A sanitized database dump (removing user information, just leaving aliases in place) could be made available if someone else wants to do the conversion, or even hosting.

There may be much betters ways, too.

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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by Bogie » Mon Nov 28, 2016 1:00 am

I'm game in helping out with that if someone finds a better/easy way to do it. I figured it was better to at least archive off the old forums for access rather than just losing them. Could be if someone wants to identify the major keeper stuff we can do up a document or something on the major stuff? Not sure.
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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by The Undying » Mon Nov 28, 2016 1:38 am

Willing to share the product and version of the last forum platform? Could be that someone can easily create a new thread view that removes pagination, and depending on the platform, automatic write-out of the resulting view to file, maybe in alternate format (PDF) may be doable. Barring the latter, someone could write a script that walks the old forum, using the new view, and writes out all the results. If the old platform is common enough, good chance that someone has already made a "archive this thing to PDF" views and scripts!

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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by Bogie » Mon Nov 28, 2016 2:00 am

The Undying wrote:Willing to share the product and version of the last forum platform? Could be that someone can easily create a new thread view that removes pagination, and depending on the platform, automatic write-out of the resulting view to file, maybe in alternate format (PDF) may be doable. Barring the latter, someone could write a script that walks the old forum, using the new view, and writes out all the results. If the old platform is common enough, good chance that someone has already made a "archive this thing to PDF" views and scripts!
PHPBB 3.1.10
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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by The Undying » Mon Nov 28, 2016 2:52 am

Possible interim solution for users than want to create a static capture of the entire site as massive HTML and graphics package (requires wget): http://superuser.com/questions/116201/h ... hpbb-forum

Aside from that, throwing in an extra plugin (if it's not too much trouble) on the page itself will probably help significantly if anyone is will to make a simple scraper: http://www.phpbb-fr.com/customise/db/vi ... all/id_107

Unless someone else tackles the problem first, I can probably cobble something together by sometime in January. Can't tackle it in December, too much going on, but for any script kiddies out there, the problem isn't too hard - you'll need an HTML parser or pre-parser though (not xhtml, sadly).

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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by Mataxes » Mon Nov 28, 2016 3:06 am

I understood the gist of what you were saying there... but the tech details are way beyond me. :D
Josh Harrison - josh@fasagames.com
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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by Bogie » Mon Nov 28, 2016 4:04 am

The Undying wrote:Possible interim solution for users than want to create a static capture of the entire site as massive HTML and graphics package (requires wget): http://superuser.com/questions/116201/h ... hpbb-forum

Aside from that, throwing in an extra plugin (if it's not too much trouble) on the page itself will probably help significantly if anyone is will to make a simple scraper: http://www.phpbb-fr.com/customise/db/vi ... all/id_107

Unless someone else tackles the problem first, I can probably cobble something together by sometime in January. Can't tackle it in December, too much going on, but for any script kiddies out there, the problem isn't too hard - you'll need an HTML parser or pre-parser though (not xhtml, sadly).
I'll look at option one. Definitely won't be option 2, we can't get any extensions working on it, that was one of the many problems. I learned a lot in the process, but unfortunately a bit too late. I won't lie free time is something I don't really have (the only reason I did the website update is the half dozen or so people we actually offered to pay for it bailed on us). If I get time to poke at the database structure I can see if there is something I can do, though phpMyAdmin leaves a lot to be desired in terms of database management tools.
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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by The Undying » Mon Nov 28, 2016 7:12 am

Been playing with it a bit today - gave me an excuse to learn some powershell (I feel dirty).

I don't know how many people are really even interested in keeping the old content, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill? I do, personally, think there's some good stuff in there, but is it easier to just selectively capture versus crawling the whole thing and pulling A LOT of outdated information (that still has value to someone, no doubt). And, aside from all that, would you guys (looking at the FASA folks) be willing to host the results (results would be process-minimal, just more static content being served)? I'd hate to go through the effort of compiling data just for it to end up homeless. :D

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Re: Looking for the old forums?

Post by Bogie » Mon Nov 28, 2016 11:47 am

I am sure we could come up with a way to host the results, if it is just static data that should be easy enough.
Todd Bogenrief
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