It very gud to see sum1 doin so much work to keep our forum stuff going. Old Bioware forum posts all got lost wen they shut that down cept few that ppl copy over. Am thinking any newer NWN player will see how much NWN ppl care to have game go on so must be a very gud game for that to happen.
Tx very much to Baaleos and other folk to help do wut rest of us canna do. 
Someone should wget the whole thing when the site is in read only mode. This is the talk in IRC.
Its nice to have multiple versions of this floating around, but I think an archive dump using wget will end up being the canonical one. And I think that this is best to do when we can't add to the forums any more.
This will be simple HTML which is something that anyone can use rather than requiring a special DB or anything. What Baaleos is doing will likely have some advantages. I'm not dissing that. But I think just a bunch of files via wget will be accessible to far more people.
I'm not very technical either and so I understand what its like not to know what wget is. So here is a link about archiving a website using wget.
IMO there were two big blows to the community that we never really recovered from.
1: When Bioware killed the original Bioware NWN forums. Those were full of great content, and great people that never migrated.
2: When IGN killed their vault.
Maybe a lesson there about sticking with community sources, that won't get yanked as quickly.
It's a lesson about not keeping all your eggs in one basket.
IMO there were two big blows to the community that we never really recovered from.
1: When Bioware killed the original Bioware NWN forums. Those were full of great content, and great people that never migrated.
2: When IGN killed their vault.
Maybe a lesson there about sticking with community sources, that won't get yanked as quickly.
Quite agree about sticking with community sources.
Incidentally, did you know that most of the original Bioware forums are available in searchable form here?
Most of the IGN vault projects (minus comments) are available here.
These are community efforts to curate content that the commercial sites eventually gave up on.
Someone should wget the whole thing when the site is in read only mode. This is the talk in IRC.
That was me, and that's what I'll be doing once the site goes r/o. Nothing fancy, no reboot, just a static mirror just the way it looks when the time comes. It'll be hosted on nwvault.
It would be great if someone could develop a blockchain based website community.
One that is p2p processed and free from ownership, censorship and can never be taken down.
Not to be confused with TOR.
But more a system where the database for the forum posts and topics are distributed across multiple nodes - each node can be a person who downloads a program that then checks with peers for data etc
It then synchronizes the data, and the live website - could then query one or more peers for data that it determines a consensus on.
At the moment - bioware is the point of weakness here, because they just need to kill one server and maybe a db server, then we lose years of posts.
If those posts existed in the cloud, distributed across the whole community - it would be harder to kill.
Quite agree about sticking with community sources.
Incidentally, did you know that most of the original Bioware forums are available in searchable form here?
Most of the IGN vault projects (minus comments) are available here.
These are community efforts to curate content that the commercial sites eventually gave up on.
Yes I know an attempt was made to capture it. I have an account at the new vault.
But it isn't nearly the same, not nearly as navigable, and for the old forum capture is sterile, not live. Even if dead, a forum backup should be web accessible so it can be part of google search.
Those forums had many enthusiastic members, that didn't resurface when they went down.
It's a lesson about not keeping all your eggs in one basket.
You can keep them in one basket, just which basket is the issue.
Freedom Force transferred to a community run forum when the company shut down their site, been fine ever since with just one community run forum.
You can keep them in one basket, just which basket is the issue.
I know that's the prevailing sentiment here, as it was before, but I think it would be better to stop making the same mistake.
Im doing some experiments with migrating the scraped data into an SMF forum.
I've already got the members transferred over - gonna have a go at Boards -> Topics and Posts
http://smf.asmodei.n...hp?action=mlist
Im making progress with an automated import tool into SMF.
Its early days, occasionally I run into a few mysql errors.
The main thing I don't like is the css formatting, but that can be changed in the forum options - that can allow us to change the spacing etc.
Lol - this is magical.
Im watching my forum instantly become popular.
I have thousands of members, and years worth of posts. (Evil Laugh)
http://smf.asmodei.net/index.php#c2
The script is still running, The Forums got ordered based on topic/post count.
So the scripting one is naturally going to be processed last. Being the biggest and all.
Lol - I was wondering why it wasn't populating the General Discussion forum/board- then I realised that it was because I had another default board called 'General Discussion'
Ive 'restarted' the script - so it will populate everything into the right places now.
Im gonna leave it going overnight - its very fast.
Does a few hundred posts per minute.
The nwn 1 forum migration to SMF is complete.
http://smf.asmodei.net/index.php
Managed to manipulate the html mostly so quote boxes show up etc
Some of the spacing in the posts is a little off.
Also - it appears to have ordered things back to front, with older posts showing up first, with newer ones on the last pages.
But the information appears to be all there - at least, as it was a few days ago when the scrape was taken.
The nwn 1 forum migration to SMF is complete.
http://smf.asmodei.net/index.php
Managed to manipulate the html mostly so quote boxes show up etc
Some of the spacing in the posts is a little off.Also - it appears to have ordered things back to front, with older posts showing up first, with newer ones on the last pages.
But the information appears to be all there - at least, as it was a few days ago when the scrape was taken.
Baaleos you rock!
I dug out my account info just to log in and tell you how much I appreciate this. I recently started working the the nwn toolset and I would be so bummed if all the wisdom archived in these forums went way. It's been immensely helpful and I know it will continue to be. Thanks for tackling this huge and important project!
Thanks for gathering up all the data, everyone. But I'm a little confused. Which one of the forum links posted will be the Official unofficial new forums? Where should we point new players for info and to go to be a community?
Tbh - I just did it cause I know some people were having trouble working with the scrape files I provided.
Its done more as a proof of concept to show that the files I provided can be used to upload the forum posts and users to a new forum.
We could even introduce a user account migration system, that allows people to take ownership of their new migrated account.
It could work on the basis of people putting something in their signature (eg: a unique key) and then when the new site sees that in their signature on the old bioware forums, it gives them the ability to login with a new account of the same name.
It would then allow them to retain the links to their old posts.
I've not looked at Omnibus - so im not sure what format the scrapes will take.
They wouldn't dare close this topic, everyone knows that the NWN1 forums are the MAIN forums on the bioware forums.
I would go as far as to say they are the heart and soul of the forums. Lol
All the same, I suggest we move our discussions to Neverwintervault.org, where many / most of us hang out these days.
Same as Proleric, I suggest, moving to Neverwintervault.org. Not only most of us hang already out there, there are the most of the old files from the old vault hosted. So, why not? Should there be more reasons 
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