Importing of history

[cmurray]

It looks like forumer does not allow exporting of the data to keep you on thier servers generating add revenue for them.

A couple of ideas and understand that I am mostly making this up as I go as usual so have no idea if any of this is possible.

Since the board is PHP based could you create a page with imbedded PHP that would request all the data in a format that could be imported onto the new server. OK something about that won't work because the page probably needs to be generated on thier server.
That would be too easy and someone would have already have done it if it was that easy.

Now the brute force method.
I looked at the forumer pages and it< appears that you only need three tags.
name or what comes after it. {span class="name"}{a name="11214"}{/a}{b}KC{/b}{/span} for the author

postdetails {span class="postdetails"}Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 3:38 pm{span for the time of post

and the postbody {span class="postbody"} for the actual content.

Seems a program could be written to load the pages then strip out the three fields which could be reloaded into the new boards database.

This is assuming that the datadase is on your server and you could dirrectly load data to it.

I always wanted to teach a i5 to surf the web.

JOel

[KC]

I know that you'd gain a cult following of Forumer users if you pulled it off. At least until they managed to stop you. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of Forumer users who keep asking for this ability.

[Matt]

Why not look through the 'archives' section of the forum? It's in plain HTML and maybe less noticeable and simpler. Also, the entire conversation is on one page, so you don't have to deal with navigating to the next page. All you would have to do is:

-The title of the post is between the &lt;title&gt; and &lt;/title&gt; tags, then trim the white space.
-In &lt;div class="phead&gt;: inside the &lt;b&gt; and &lt;/b&gt; is the posters name and right after the &lt;/b&gt; is the post date
-In &lt;div class="postcolor"&gt; Is the post content, just stop when you get to the &lt;script&gt; tag, as these are ads, or the &lt;/div&gt; tag.

Then just put this in a loop, and write the values to a DB.

One possible problem is users. If all the same users on the forumer forum are not registered on the DIYC forum, (or registered under the same name), you would have to account for that in your code.

If there's anything I can do let me know!
-Matt

[fkostyun]

One trick would be to have a username created of "archive" and create all the archive posts as that, and then just put the original poster in the message body.

[P. Short]

I, for one, do not want anything 'automatically' (or manually, for that matter) copied over into this forum under my user ID, so I would vote for Frank's suggestion. Of course, I also think that there isn't any real need to perform any special action to save the data from the old forums. Forumer seems to be taking a long time to delete the forum, and the information will be pretty stale by the time that they delete things.

--

Phil