App to save SMF forum thread's content includes attachments & images ? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BravoV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 09:03:18 am
content: Preferred a free or open source one.I'm seeing lots of valuable information at posts that are gone just because of using external free image hostings, especially for the images.I know there is a print feature here, but it saves the text content only, what I want is to download completely offline everything includes images and non images attachments, basically the whole content in a single thread of discussion.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 09:53:17 am
content: Honestly, I'd just screenshot or copy/paste the text into some files and throw the attachments into a folder. Might not be instant, but how many posts do you intend to archive?To my knowledge it doesn't exist, and I doubt it would, as it's the sort of thing that would be a bit fiddly to program, and has a bit of a niche use case.

author: BravoV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 10:00:22 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on May 06, 2018, 09:53:17 amThe whole thread, every posts with all images and attachments saved.I did manually too, painstakingly saved the images and files attached one by one.Just wonder if there is an automated solution for that, that will be a really time saving and also probably much more less errors compared to manual. E.g.: Files or images that have identical filenames at different posts, but actually not the same, like revisions and etc.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 10:48:22 am
content: I mean you can save entire web pages, so that might make the whole copying process faster, and for whatever attachments there are, you can just download them.

author: nanofrog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 11:33:32 am
content: You might want to giveHTTTrack Website Copiera try.

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2018, 01:37:35 pm
content: As forum threads are strictly hierarchical, with all content hosted at EEVblog having a path that is under the thread's root URL,wgetcan handle it. However if you don't want to get banned be really *CAREFUL* with wget's options to avoid inadvertently trying to mirror the whole site. You'll probably need a second pass to pull in external images if you restrict the first pass tightly enough to only get the desired thread.I suggest messaging Gnif and asking permission before using wget, and also until you have it wrapped in a fully tested and debugged thread download script, severely 'throttling' it with the --limit-rate option and closely monitoring it as it runs so you can catch PEBKAC issues before your PC tries to be the internet in a box. (Don't become Jen!)As others have already pointed out, a lower geek cred but far less dangerous and more practical option for most of us is to go to the 'All' view of the topic and save it from our browser as 'Web page, complete', then manually go though it and save attachments. If there are attachment revisions with the same file name, organise them in folders by post number, or append the reply number to their name to distinguish them.

author: t1d
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 08, 2018, 04:56:51 am
content: I was researching this, for my own use. I know that it is an old post, but I thought it worthy to say that, as far as copying the attachments, you only need to copy the one that has all of the final revisions... Though, I guess that is obvious. Plus, I wanted to bump it, to see if anyone has any new ideas.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 08, 2018, 07:36:32 am
content: Option 1: your browser's in-built "save page" feature. Drags in all the images of a page too.Option 2: wget. Can drag in all the images of a page too (see below)It's installed by default on most popular Linux distros and should be available for windows too.$ wget --helpwget has options to pull in 'page requisites' such as images, stylesheets, etc. It also has an option to convert page links to local versions (so links in your offline backup correctly point to other pages in your backup.$ wget -pk "http://eevblog.com/forum/dsasdf....."Caveats:Don't use any of the recursive options without first checking with the forum admins and their rules.You might need to change the user agent of wget to emulate a normal web browser, else the site might be hard-coded to deny the request.Single-page downloads are not likely to cause anyone worries, that's exactly what a normal web browser does anyway.

author: aandrew
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 08, 2018, 06:25:42 pm
content: Quote from: Ian.M on May 06, 2018, 01:37:35 pmThis is a big problem, because once a thread gets to around 5 pages, "All" disappears and these are specifically the threads which I really wish I could capture and preserve.Man I wish there was a solid RSS feed or some way to pull in entire discussions in a machine-friendly way. :-(