When some of my favorite google groups forums were going away, I wrote a perl scraper that started grabbing materials from my groups. Eventually Google perceived it as unwanted or suspicious contact, and shut off access to google for the entire company of 2000 I worked for at the time. Fortunately this was on a timer, but I was sweating bullets.
Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#32It seems to me like you don’t own this data. If you want to preserve this data, try again with the owner?
Unfortunately the owner doesn't make themselves available to be contacted for anything at this point. They were more involved years ago. As far as who owns the data, everything mentioned above is community-owned at least. So if anything it'd be up to individual community members, I'd think, to be OK with it. Since the forum is fairly dead, many of those original members aren't even active either.
Why do you think they're making themselves unreachable? Is it a mental health thing, or about priorities, or something else?
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#33I wonder if it wouldn't be best legally and practically to just have archive.org scrape it for you and link people to that.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#34I wonder if it wouldn't be best legally and practically to just have archive.org scrape it for you and link people to that.
I'd assume it'd be best legally and linking would probably work. But it wouldn't be as discoverable. Relying on sharing links only would work if everyone's connected but unfortunately that's not usually the case. Especially these days with various groups being involved with separate social media (discord, facebook groups, etc.).
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#35The V-Bulletin software publishes the database credentials inside of the web root as part of a settings file. You should be able to gain access to the web root from the web host with the correct validation or access to a company email address. From there, search where the settings php file is containing the credentials to the database and read them out. Use them to log into the database. I don't know why the other comments aren't suggesting this as a first step. You should not need a scraper to read the content back out. I've performed this procedure many times with VBulletin and other similar software like PHPBB and SMF, admittedly a decade back at this point.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately the owner doesn't make themselves available to be contacted for anything at this point. They were more involved years ago. As far as who owns the data, everything mentioned above is community-owned at least. So if anything it'd be up to individual community members, I'd think, to be OK with it. Since the forum is fairly dead, many of those original members aren't even active either.
Why do you think they're making themselves unreachable? Is it a mental health thing, or about priorities, or something else?
I don't really like making assumptions honestly.
My best guess is that the model of car is "older" now, and they've subsequently moved onto other interests, including possibly the newer model, which I heard (but can't confirm) this person built a similar site for.
The only real changes to the forum in the past 3-4 years are more ads and many more performance/reliability problems, plus bots.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#37This reminds me one of my first programming gigs, the owner of a shop lost his password to his online store front, and he wanted to get off it and get onto Shopify, so I had to write a python scraper to save everything for him and upload into Shopify
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#38You think that your car make/model is bad, the one for mine is the same but also has an expired SSL certificate and the outgoing email is broken, so it's slowly getting deindexed from Google and you can't sign up for an account (can't get the verification email) so there's no way to access the attachments, etc. It's sad, honestly.
I ran a car forum (sold to VerticalScope 15+ years ago) and it's still chugging along on the same version of PunBB that I had it on when I left, so it seems that even the "experts" haven't found a simple way to migrate between forum softwares
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#39> This is a gem to help extract data from vBulletin Forums, specifically those which you have no control over.
https://github.com/lloydpick/vbulletin
This is a very old tool, it’s hard to say if it will work; then again, seems very relevant too so worst case it could provide an inspiration.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#40I think vbb has an archive site, similar to how mailing lists look, not sure what the subpath is.