Mordt Posted July 26, 2023 (edited) Anyone have any knowledge about archiving a forum? I’m a member of a forum that’s being shut down. It’ll be locked on the 28th in three days, and it’ll be deleted on October 31st from what I’ve seen. It’s a massive forum, with just the General Discussion sub forum having about 136k threads, so it would be a huge project. I did some googling and found a site called the Wayback Machine, but I have little idea on how it works, and no idea the logistics of archiving such a big forum. Like would someone be able to write a macro to automate it, where would all of the data be stored, wether it’s even possible or worth doing. Basically I’m looking for advice/info from people more experienced at this sort of thing. TIA. Edit: also looking for advice on creating forums. Edited July 26, 2023 by Mordt Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Peppermint_M Posted July 29, 2023 I am not sure if that is 100% possible without permission from the site owners. It might be possible to ask the webmaster of the site to allow the data to be copied from their servers to some you are funding (as I guess they plan to take it offline so they no longer pay for hosting) but I am not sure of the costs involved and just how well data transfer will work. Creating a new forum can be as easy as searching the web for a free forum creation site that you want to use. The Wayback Machine takes snapshots of a site and archives them, then you can search the domain name and see a timeline of the site. Choosing a date on that timeline has captures taken on that time/date. It works pretty well for most things but can be missing some pages and functions on a site. (I use it to look at lost fan sites from my youth, it is okay for that purpose). For you, it would likely be most useful once the site is defunct, then the final captures will have the most up to date pages possible. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
