Downloading a forum

[liptonlover]

I am a member of a forum which is very dear to me. Unfortunately we're not as active as we once were; it's a forum for teens interested in *debating* with other teens online. Unfortunately we covered every topic anyone could conceive of, also our lives got busy. But I want to preserve previous states of the site, complete with individual posts in individual threads in a way that can be viewed and navigated again after the forum is long gone. Are there any free solutions?

Thanks, Nate

 

[twoodcc]

what type of forum is it?

 

[liptonlover]

Powered by invision power board v1.3 Final
Is there anything else you need? We have a custom skin too which adds a little functionality, though I'm not worried about losing that so much.

Nate

 

[twoodcc]

Powered by invision power board v1.3 Final
Is there anything else you need? We have a custom skin too which adds a little functionality, though I'm not worried about losing that so much.

Nate

basically you need to know what type of forum software they run, and if it's open source (like phpbb), you can download and install it on your own computer.

you'll have to have mysql installed.

then you'll have to backup the current forum database to your machine, and restore it to your machine.

then you can basically run it locally on your network.

i can go into more details if you wish.

 

[liptonlover]

Fortunately I'm technical minded so I sorta know what you're talking about... I'm willing to do that but it sounds a bit complicated for the task. Also I'll want to share this with the other board members.

All it should have to be is an automated version of what Safari has built in... When you go to 'File' and do 'save as...' I just need to do it a ton of times and in an intelligent manner.

The best I can do is say it's an invision power board. I'm guessing that's what you need but it doesn't look like it's open source.

 

[twoodcc]

let's be straight on exactly what you are trying to do.

do you just want basically screen shots of the forum?

or do you actually want to be able to use for forum on your own computer?

if you want to be able to actually use the forum, you'll have to host it on your own machine

 

[liptonlover]

The most important thing is just to have the content downloaded onto my computer. If each page is saved individually without any sort of connection, at worst I can put them all in folders and have them sorted that way. Being able to navigate them via the original links like on the site or through a sidebar if there's an app that does this would be nice but again, not necessary.

Nate

 

[dmmcintyre3]

see if it is on http://archive.org

 

[liptonlover]

Thanks. It's not there, but I found a place to request that they crawl it.

I'd still like other possibilities as well though... I don't see anything on the wayback machine's site that says I can then download it even after they crawl the forum.

Nate