Saving pictures and threads from the old forum
Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2013 9:44 am
It appears that Lefora have finally sorted themselves out and are now displaying pictures that were previously 'Uploaded' to threads. They are doing it in a weird way though - the pictures are now links that you have to click on to see them one at a time.
If somebody has a LOT of time on their hands - and a computer with a lot of available space - it is possible to now copy those old pictures by opening them up, right clicking on the image and selecting 'Save Picture As'. Oddly, even though the pictures are in jpg format on the Lefora site, when you try to save them, they are converted to .png files (each called untitled). You will then need to change the name from untitled to something that relates to the post/thread. Png files are still fine though and can be used in graphics programs or on websites, so the conversion seems somewhat unnecessary.
In theory scraping the pictures should be possible by writing a spider scripts to trawl the site and extract all the images, but Lefora have effectively blocked that by only allowing access to the pictures if you are a logged in user - something an automated script can't be.
This is going to be a long, tedious manual job for someone! Any volunteers?
Now that Lefora know we have moved and have slapped Nick on the wrist for posting links to this new location on the old forum I would not be surprised if they decide to close the old forum down sooner rather than later. They will probably monitor usage and shut it after a certain period of inactivity. So extracting anything of value is possibly quite urgent.
As mentioned elsewhere I have a backup of some of the forum (up to mid June), with each thread saved as a csv file. Pictures that were posted from outside sources (ie Photobucket) are preserved but none of the ones uploaded to the old forum are. My original idea was to see if the old threads could somehow be imported into this new forum but having taken a look at the way the database is structured I now don't think that is possible, unfortunately.
What I propose instead is to create the old threads as static html pages which can be linked to from the relevant forums here. Not entirely ideal, but at least a lot of our archive will be saved that way.
A lot will depend on how much hosting space Nick has because there are thousands of threads! And if we do find a way to import the old pictures, the space requirement for the domain will be enormous!
Work in progress.
Martin
If somebody has a LOT of time on their hands - and a computer with a lot of available space - it is possible to now copy those old pictures by opening them up, right clicking on the image and selecting 'Save Picture As'. Oddly, even though the pictures are in jpg format on the Lefora site, when you try to save them, they are converted to .png files (each called untitled). You will then need to change the name from untitled to something that relates to the post/thread. Png files are still fine though and can be used in graphics programs or on websites, so the conversion seems somewhat unnecessary.
In theory scraping the pictures should be possible by writing a spider scripts to trawl the site and extract all the images, but Lefora have effectively blocked that by only allowing access to the pictures if you are a logged in user - something an automated script can't be.
This is going to be a long, tedious manual job for someone! Any volunteers?
Now that Lefora know we have moved and have slapped Nick on the wrist for posting links to this new location on the old forum I would not be surprised if they decide to close the old forum down sooner rather than later. They will probably monitor usage and shut it after a certain period of inactivity. So extracting anything of value is possibly quite urgent.
As mentioned elsewhere I have a backup of some of the forum (up to mid June), with each thread saved as a csv file. Pictures that were posted from outside sources (ie Photobucket) are preserved but none of the ones uploaded to the old forum are. My original idea was to see if the old threads could somehow be imported into this new forum but having taken a look at the way the database is structured I now don't think that is possible, unfortunately.
What I propose instead is to create the old threads as static html pages which can be linked to from the relevant forums here. Not entirely ideal, but at least a lot of our archive will be saved that way.
A lot will depend on how much hosting space Nick has because there are thousands of threads! And if we do find a way to import the old pictures, the space requirement for the domain will be enormous!
Work in progress.
Martin
