RE: import all data from the old forum into the new one (highly unlikely)

General CPCWiki related
1

Hey Gryzor, Long time.

I was Extreme Gamer on CPC Zone back in the day(silly egg avatar > Dizzy)

Anyway, I posted this on Xyphoe discord to a different Gryzor(egg on face) but didn’t want this to sink into oblivion as might be of use thought wise.

It probably more likely if it was done in an archived state to new forum or just to a subdomain << which removes major headache.. Not simple but doable. Ignore stuff like avatars its the data being available that is relevant.

Take a sample set of your old database .sql backup. Lets say work with 6 categories and ten posts per cat.

rename table rows and columns to reflect the database structure of the new forum db. If you need to enter a column inbetween 2 columms there is a sql command to do that so that the query doesn’t fail on select query

It been an extreme long time thinking about sql for me but if you know someone very long standing in the community(who you trust) with up to date knowledge and expertise. I say its well doable and if thought out right AI like claude might just make it a helluva lot easier.

Just food for thought.

2

Hey man, glad to see you here! I actually missed your avatar​:grin:

You’re describing a migration, actually, if I’m getting it correctly.

Well, believe me, much more capable men than me have tried. The official importer is, unfortunately, half-baked.

I’ll try to find a thread I had read where someone got close, so that you can get an idea of what it entails.

However, one thing we do want to do is to put up the old forum on read only form. That’ll be something, at least.

3

I’d call it a migration of some type.

Its all done by hand on a localhost server, per se. The reason I thought of a subdomain for it as people can just post links from it to continue discussions and while its WIP can be locked up via .htaccess once deployed semi live etc

Right, off to get tipsy now. Good to see the place back.

4

Ohh so you mean copy paste data by hand?

Yeah probably not doing that :grin: If anyone wants to I cutie probably export a chunk for them to convert, but I don’t think it’s worth it, sadly.

Have a good one!

5

Ah, No worries.

This seems to be the latest snapshot that kind of works on Wayback Machine

Some of the posts have been crawled, and some just don’t work

I thought I’d stick it here. I had the though of using a wayback machine downloader but its an all or nothing kind of thing for me.

6

Yeah, started working on the restoration of the old forum today a bit. Only some light reading to remind me how it was set up to prepare the new server accordingly. So hopefully we’ll know within days. Emphasis on hopefully

7

Good to hear.

I’ve been messing for like 20 mins on the wiki application section and a fair few .zip files download. Sadly, some just get a 403 error. But I’m rather impressed how many actually download.

8

That’s impressive indeed, given that the db was so badly damaged that it was essentially wiped out…

9

I know Discourse the company has a migration service but it’s possible they already have a script for the old forum software and maybe they share that script under the AGPL.

@Typhon I promise not to get into a licensing discussion here too :wink:

10

yeah they do have an importer, but as far as I can tell it’s far from perfect and is basically a base for others to work on :frowning:

11

I know a little bit of Ruby (although I did get a personal lesson from Matz himself!) if you’re thinking of going down the import route.

12

Thanks, much appreciated. But I don’t think you need to touch Ruby for this…

13

Talking about Ruby and wayback machine. I had a try at downloading the whole archived website using waybackmachinedownloader last weekend. I started with this version. It has install instructions.

I ended up on this fork

I think I got blocked as I in too many requests and no delay as just 403’d a lot after a while. Maybe something had changed.

14

Once installed I used Ruby command prompt via ruby 4.0(admin privs) >

cd C:\Users\yourusername.local\share\gem\ruby\4.0.0\gems\wayback_machine_downloader-2.3.1\bin

then I copy pasted this from a timestamp

wayback_machine_downloader http://cpcwiki.eu --from 20101203024504 --delay 7.0 >> ruby cmd window

It was like 99,000+ files or something. It could take a long time. snapshot gathering not to long but I’m still 403’d so not sure whats happening. I did manage to download some files before the 403 stuff happened :frowning:

15

Hello,

This information might already be somewhere on the forum, but I can’t seem to find it.
I wanted to know if messages from the old forum will be imported or accessible in an archive somewhere, or if they are completely lost.

16

Working on putting the old forum up again, best case scenario, it’s live within the weekend.

17

Great, thanks for the info :slight_smile:

18

@Gryzor what’s the best way for people who have the means to send you some cash to help cover some costs here?

19

Hey man,

Very, very very much appreciated.

One can use PayPal.Me . However I’ll add (at some point) subscription levels to the forum as well. Only benefit will be, as in the old forum, that the donors will have a special decoration in their avatar.

Thanks again,

T