Compiling Old Forum Threads

[Garn!]

I've obtained an HTML copy of the entire TOR Forum. I over-estimated, it was only 1411 pages. I will see about uploading it in the next day or so.

Before I upload and post the link for the archive though, I wanted to make you all aware that the effort to convert to EPUB or PDF has hit a snag.

• PDF is possible if I duplicate the entire download effort once again. Time consuming (maybe two weeks) but feasable. Note that the way this is handled, I would be downloading 3000-4000 pages, at a guess, as it uses the default of 15 messages per web page displayed; the HTML pages were downloaded using 40/page. There is no way to get around this setting. (For those wondering, every webpage of 15 messages/page is roughly 4 PDF pages in length. So this is going to end up being a large PDF file.)
• EPUB seems to be a major problem as it requires manually editing (to an unknown extent as yet) each page's source code. Search and Replace will do 80+% of the work I would guess - but only after I spend a couple of days figuring out what can be stripped and what must remain. Then tweak things a bit for better display.

As previously stated, the reason I am advocating that the forums be archived in PDF and/or EPUB format is that right now a search would have to be performed on all 1400 pages individually in order to imitate searching the entire forum for a keyword that you know is somewhere inside, but not which specific topic.

So, I wanted to ask the TOR Community how critical the ability to search through the entire forum is on the following scale:
1 = Absolutely Vital
2 = Easier, but I can make do
3 = Whatever, I'll find it eventually
4 = Doubtful I'll search the archive
5 = Waste of effort
By my personal standards, it's option 1 = Absolutely Vital. While the existence of the archive means we've got a copy even if catastrophe strikes, without being in an easily searchable format, few users will go back and peruse the information inside.

So, please, enter your vote so I have some idea whether I should put in the required effort. And while you're at it, any preference - PDF or EPUB?

[Yusei]

If you want, I can probably find some time to write a program that would download the forum and build a PDF. It would spare you from downloading it again.

[Mim]

@Garn! Thank you for even considering it. This seems like an awfully lot of work, so I'm not going to dare respond with anything more than 2-3

Yusei, This is very generous of you to offer to help him.

[Garn!]

Yusei,
Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate the fact that you were willing to assist. As there doesn't seem to be much interest in the PDF/EPUB project (based on feedback to my question) there is little point to going through the programming effort.

Anyway, for PDF's I was using Acrobat. It was just a matter of giving Acrobat URL links - and getting a response back from ClickDev. I think automating the request process might cause ClickDev's servers to perceive things as a DDOS attempt.

[Garn!]

I compiled the old forum threads related to The One Ring into a ZIP archive: C7 The One Ring Forum Archive - HTML Format.zip.

All of the topics are included from the old ClickDev forums. As HTML pages, the various links will direct you to the original ClickDev content or any other linked destination. Eventually these links will expire as the ClickDev forums are terminated.

To use these pages you will need to unzip the archive, then just open a new tab or window in any browser, click on File>Open (or, press CTRL+O) and select the topic that you want to load.

Each page is named after the topic title. There are a few alterations and exceptions:

• Windows does not allow certain characters in file names: \ ?< . % * /: |" > so these characters are automatically stripped out, replaced by a space. So one topic in Kuro, called "P:NW", was changed to "P NW". Hopefully this will not cause too much confusion.
• Index pages are prefixed with "@ " to force them to the top of the alphabetical listing; they also include " - Index" at the end of the topic name. Note the links cannot be used to load the archived HTML pages - they will load the original ClickDev topic.
• Pinned topics are prefixed with "_ " to force them into a secondary position in the alphabetical listing.
• Other punctuation marks at the beginning of a topic's name were removed (and any matching end punctuation); other punctuation within the title was left unchanged. This was to force correct alphabetizing of all topics.
• Topics with lots of messages had page numbers, in the format " -- pg##" added to the end of the topic name.
• Some topic names were repeated and in these cases the original starting date was used to differentiate these otherwise similar topics. While including a sub-title might have been better, it might also have created file names that were too long. The dates allowed shorter names with better consistency.

I hope this is of use to players.

[jamesrbrown]

Garn! Thanks for doing that. You have helped preserve a great piece of TOR history!

[Robin Smallburrow]

Fantastic resource Garn, thanks very much from all of us 'oldies' on the forum!!

I have saved it to my hard drive now!

Robin S.

[Garn!]

You're welcome, gentlemen.

[Mim]

@Garn! I'm still stunned by the amazing job you've done on this & how much you've helped us.

Thank you!

[Rich H]

These compiled forum threads should really be 'stickied' at the top of each forum they relate to. Garn has done one for each game - amazing dedication.