Exporting threads from forums?

[teddymines]

Is there a way to capture the threads from a particular forum into a text file? Often, I'm looking for a very specific topic that cannot be easily searched. Having a bunch of threads from a forum in a plain text file would allow me to read through information offline, maybe even on a PDA.

Any thoughts to an export feature to support this?

[snowmoon]

Nevermind....


http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/printview.php?t=122558&start=0

[snowmoon]

Baldrick:


Any chance you could edit the printtopic page so that if post subject is equvilant to "" or null then not to prtin it?

[Baldrick]

removed the subject

[vhelp]

teddymines,

I was sort of interested in this idea too. Anyways, I usually want to just
drag everything into word and do my own quick clean-up and then import
into Excel and do further filterng. It's not bad, when you need
some HTML in non-HTML. Used to do this w/ Pennysaver adds, when I
was looking for a new Apartment. I need a way to import all the add w/out
having to click every "A", "B", "C". . . link and fianally to "Z", then import
into Word (to do some quick fancy tidying) then imported into Excel, where
I have filtering done by City, apt Type, Price, PhoneNo, etc. Turned out
great, for a weekly thing. Then, later on down the road, I was looking for
a new car. Basically did the same thing, (same website) but layout was
slitely difference, but was no problem for me.

How I was able to get all the ads into one complete whole webpage,
was I type in " " and (space) and got ALL listings. Now, I don't know if
this would apply to this FORUM. would be nice to have a DAY
area, and one can just click it and get ALL posts w/out having to press
the Next button, or 1,2,3,4 etc. But, this may be a limit due to the
nature or complexity of this FORUM.

But, if they're is a way, I'd sure LOVE to know, so I can do the same -
* Import into Excel and filter by such things as Subject, or Area, or words like "DVD"
or "MPEG" etc. etc.
* But, MS Access would probably be my platform for this project and a way
to organize, and archive this website, etc. Ideas just keeps on comming!!

But the DAY thing is agood starting idea. A person can go in and click
TODAY and ALL posts up to current time will be displayed in either ASCII
or semi-html format like that "Printer-friendly page" outputs.

Thanks for your consideration to this idea(s)

-vhelp

[teddymines]

A live export, or even an emailed journal would be nice. For one, you'd be guaranteed text data, which is easy to work with. Also, you could set up email journals to send you forums A, B, and C for a specific time range like October 2002.

I could spend a lot of time browsing the forums, which adds to the demands of the forums database and the web servers. Having a query script run behind the web interface and email users directly would demand little I/O bandwidth to and from the datacenter. Even a per-request interface would be nice (send me all posts from 1/1/2002 to current, from forum Newbie, at 11:00GMT today).

I hope this is considered. I am seeking the best way to solve a particular problem, and have not had much luck finding it or getting answers to my pleas for help. People don't always title their posts well ("Please Help!!!" is a good example of this) and searching for a common word returns too many posts. I am sure my question has been answered before, but don't feel right wasting forum space with yet another posting that will probably be ignored again.

[Baldrick]

To put together a live php page containing lots of post(for example all todays 900 posts) would take too much cpu time.

Maybe I could make static compressed pages about once a day instead, like all todays posts, one month posts from a forum...

[teddymines]

Thanks for the reply Baldrick. Sure, a live page would take up a lot of CPU time, especially if it is generated per user request. Not the best idea.

What do you think of this idea: capture each forum's posts into a text file for that month. So you'd have "VCD-Newbie-Oct2002.txt" which would contain all of November's posts to the Newbie forum. This could be done on off-hours shortly after the month has passed, and the text files can be zipped to save space.

Then users can download these zipped text files as needed, or enter a request to have them emailed to them. I'd love to have access to the last 6 months posts from the Capturing forum so I can read on my PDA or on a PC without being online. As mentioned earlier, this would give people another way to browse the topics prior to posting a common subject, and therefore cut down on reposts and wasted space.