I wrote something 10 years ago that scrapes a vBulletin forum into a Rails app and exposes a UI so the data is accessible. Happy to share the code with you if you'd like
Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#52When 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.
Did they block the IP?
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#53Backing 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 Old PHP server running out-of-date PHP applications...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…
The exact same thing happened to a phpBB bass guitar forum I was a member of about 15 years ago. The owner just disappeared and we knew the bills weren’t being paid.
Hypthetically, I found a remote code execution vulnerability in that version of phpBB, read the configuration file to get the MySQL details, and then used mysqldump to download the database.
You can find exploits by just Googling or looking in Metasploit. They’re usually pretty simple query string things.
We set up a clone of the forum with a similar name just in time, then emailed the user database to tell them about the new site when the old one disappeared.
Sadly this caught the previous owner’s attention and he sent a cease and desist, despite his version of the site not existing any longer. So, we wiped the database, and then all the users just signed up again. It still lives on as https://www.basschat.co.uk/
Hypothetically.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#54Earlier 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?
Sometimes people just don’t care.
I moved on, please don’t bother me about it and let the website live or die.
That’s about the answer I got the last time one of my favorite websites was due to be deleted.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#55Over a decade ago I helped quite a few people migrate their forums off places like Proboards, ActiveBoards, and many other "free" forum hosts to their own hosts using phpBB/SimpleMachinesForum etc.; many such hosts had highly customized forum software and no ability to download the database in any usable format. Copies of my converters might still be floating around on the Internet. At least one of these free hosts used something fairly similar to vBulletin, IIRC.
The process is in principle not difficult: scrape the site (I recommend a dedicated scraper for that), then go through and extract everything relevant into a SQL database formatted the way your target forum software expects. The hardest part was recovering BBCode formatting in a usable fashion. Unfortunately my converters were written back when I didn't understand HTML parsing terribly well, so they're a hodgepodge of ugly regexes and handrolled string parsing.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#56You should be able to determine who the hosting company is, and offer to pay to keep the site up.
If the hosting company is paid they will make and keep a backup for you but under the permissions/access of the original owner.
If the hosting company gets permission to add you as admin to the site from the site owner, who may not be in touch with you, but may respond to the hosting company, then, (since you are paying the hosting company they will be happy to keep you around) you are home free.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#57Backing 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…
The exact same thing happened to a phpBB bass guitar forum I was a member of about 15 years ago. The owner just disappeared and we knew the bills weren’t being paid. Hypthetically , I found a remote code execution vulnerability in that version of phpBB, read the configuration file to get the MySQL details, and then used mysqldump to download the database. You can find exploits by just Googling or looking in Metasploi…
Amazing story. I hypothetically consider you a hero.
>Sadly this caught the previous owner’s attention and he sent a cease and desist, despite his version of the site not existing any longer.
Wow, what an ass. I just can't understand the thought process of some people.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#58Two 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 ;)
Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real.
Someone in a situation like this would be well-advised to instead direct creative energy at making option #1 work for you.
(Example: Some kind of crawling/archiving, to capture a copy while you can, and then you can develop good scraping of the data out of your copy at your leisure, whether it ends up being scraped from archived HTML, JSON, XML, or whatever. There's a chance you need a bespoke/tweaked crawler, to avoid missing data, such as posts that are for some reason reachable by human in a Web browser, but not by a particular crawler, and then the consideration to keep in mind is to try to avoid doing something that might look like the bad kind of "hacking" to a non-technical person, even though you aren't bypassing authentication&authorization nor exploiting any vulnerabilities.)
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#59There is only one admin? I was an admin on about a half dozen vB sites back in the day (none of them mine) and we had a lot of redundancy there, and they were mostly just to BS with people. I find it surprising a forum of any notable size would have an admin running it as the single point of failure. That’s disappointing.
It sounds like you have some options here. Best of luck.
Re: Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
#60Where was the vBulletin board hosted, and do you have any kind of shell access to the server?