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

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

#61

Post by dotancohen »

neilv wrote: post #58
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 ;)

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 i…

  > Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real.
HN has a worldwide reader base. In what countries would this not be illegal?

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

#62

Post by dotancohen »

phire wrote: post #50
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.

No, deleting the original posts is not problem solving.

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

#64

Post by dotancohen »

nneonneo wrote: post #55

Over 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 u…

Modern HTML parsers are still a hodgepodge of ugly regaxes and hand rolled string parsing.

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

#65

Post by mobilemidget »

In the spirit of the name of this website, there have been plenty of RCE reports describing how to hack/crack a vBulletin. If the owner is not there, I guess he also doesn't run any software updates?

Though this suggestion might not be acceptable in the eyes of many.

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

#67

Post by gexla »

Modified3019 wrote: post #57
bfirsh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even though I didn't keep the software maintained, I wouldn't be happy that sensitive member information (email addresses, login info) was leaked (unknown destination) by the community. I would feel some responsibility for that information getting out, and at least feel the need to reach out to past members and anyone using that data. If I wanted to be an "ass" then I would have taken harsher legal routes.

I would just scrape the site. I would even consider anonymizing names, as everyone should have the right to delete old content IMO.

After scraping, I would then watch the analytics. Anything which seems popular could then be given more attention. For example, I would probably create a design for the site itself, then create dedicated pages for anything popular. The pages could be curated "this is what you came for" and a link to the original pages.

Forums probably don't come back. You could start out with some minimal community features such as comments to see if anyone is willing to bite. A Discord server or similar could be another option. Kind of depends on the demographic I guess. Old people like forums. ;)

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

#69

Post by thexa4 »

I've backed up a forum[1] by crawling it using wget and creating a WARC file.

I hosted it again by writing a python script[2] to serve responses from that WARC file again and put it behind nginx with caching enabled.

[1] https://forums.empiresmod.com/index.php

[2] https://gitlab.com/thexa4/warc-server

[2, deb package] https://gitlab.com/thexa4/warc-server/-/jobs/5213679726/arti...

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

#70

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

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.

That is self-evident.
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