Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#41

Post by prawn »

spike021 wrote: post #36
prawn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might just view it as old, passive income now. If it's a niche and not likely that profitable, you could ask about buying or profit sharing and work on improving and maintaining it. Chances are, if it's not a priority for them, they're well aware it could use improvement and maintenance, but just never get around to it. Yet nor do they want to give it up.

I've run a forum for 20+ years and always wish I had time to do it justice, but other projects generally have better prospects, are more interesting or are more profitable. I'd at least be curious about a pitch that gave it fresh eyes but without losing the entire revenue stream or risking backend or inviting legal issues. In case any of that applies here and is useful to you.

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#43

Post by spike021 »

prawn wrote: post #41
spike021 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might just view it as old, passive income now. If it's a niche and not likely that profitable, you could ask about buying or profit sharing and work on improving and maintaining it. Chances are, if it's not a priority for them, they're well aware it could use improvement and maintenance, but just never get around to it. Yet nor do they want to give it up. I've run a forum for 20+ years and always wish I had time…

I believe others have definitely reached out to the owner previously just for help with the performance/reliability problems. Not 100% sure on whether they've offered to buy the site or not. Either way everything I've heard is the owner either isn't responsive at all or very much doesn't have the desire to dig into any of the issues.

My guess is also probably the passive income side being the priority, especially since they've definitely increased the ads at least since I first joined the forum about a decade ago.

Thanks for the input. It's appreciated. Unfortunately as you can probably understand it's a relatively simple but complicated problem.

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#44

Post by prawn »

spike021 wrote: post #43
prawn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might just view it as old, passive income now. If it's a niche and not likely that profitable, you could ask about buying or profit sharing and work on improving and maintaining it. Chances are, if it's not a priority for them, they're well aware it could use improvement and maintenance, but just never get around to it. Yet nor do they want to give it up. I've run a forum for 20+ years and always wish I had time…

I believe others have definitely reached out to the owner previously just for help with the performance/reliability problems. Not 100% sure on whether they've offered to buy the site or not. Either way everything I've heard is the owner either isn't responsive at all or very much doesn't have the desire to dig into any of the issues. My guess is also probably the passive income side being the priority, especially sin…

Ads don't make much and forums can be a bit of a pain, so the owner is likely just trying to recoup something for the historic hassles. If monetisation is not ads, it's subscriptions and a site owner can be reluctant to foist costs on regular users (who've contributed a lot of content).

Their reluctance to fix issues could be lack of time or wariness of breaking something and creating more work. The reluctance to sell could be because they don't know how to price it and don't want to regret selling it. In many instances, a web property is something you've dreamed of making bigger and you'd hate to give it up only to watch someone else take it further.

Scraping might just invite a legal hassle. I gather that this is the not the route you're interested in, but personally I'd suggest trying to find a casual way to trade messages with the owner, find out their pain points and go from there. There would likely be a path where they can maintain some control but get help and relinquish the stranglehold.

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#45

Post by donohoe »

boomer918 wrote: post #29
ComputerGuru wrote: post #23

Backing up to WARC, HTML, whatever is great for posterity but not much more than that. Assuming you're a member of the organization and therefore licensed to use the content (but merely unable to access it): Purely hypothetically speaking, if an admin is this mia and obviously not on top of the job, the odds are probably high that they've neglected maintenance. Old PHP server running out-of-date PHP applications... n…

What you're suggesting could get OP in trouble if caught. Not sure it's worth it, but then again I'm not that into cars.

It’s okay as they were “purely hypothetically speaking”

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#47

Post by mikolajw »

You can try forum-dl, a forum scraping tool I've been writing for this purpose: https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl

It's single-threaded, alpha-quality software, and still isn't compatible with many forums and themes. But it can export WARCs and may just happen to work for you.

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#49

Post by deadbolt »

donohoe wrote: post #45
boomer918 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're suggesting could get OP in trouble if caught. Not sure it's worth it, but then again I'm not that into cars.

It’s okay as they were “purely hypothetically speaking”

And the site is called "hacker news" ;)

Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

#50

Post by phire »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #16

Two options: 1. Scrape it with wget or httrack or similar tool. 2. If the owners not really around it’s probably behind on its security patches, and there’s some relatively recent-ish vB exploits that would let you gain code execution and take a backup the “extremely illegal way” of the entire database, site, etc. I recommend 1, but 2 is amusing to ponder briefly over a coffee ;)

I've seen 2 done after the admin became uncooperative and kind of held the community forum hostage.

They even went a step further, deleted all the old posts out of the database and setup a redirect to the new forum hosting.

Very illegal, but very effective at solving the problem.

Post reply on HN