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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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From what I gather, a month from now the ChessTalk website could be sold and there is no guarantee that the 500 pages of threads will be archived and be accessible.
I think they are important for preserving Canadian chess history – content, opinions and personalities.
For example, I have enjoyed the Great Chess Quotes thread. It runs about 15 pages now. I would like to save those pages as a pdf document and then print them out and have them bound together as a booklet.
I can save an individual page of the thread but is there a mechanism by which I can download the whole 15 pages at once and then convert them to a pdf document?
From what I gather, a month from now the ChessTalk website could be sold and there is no guarantee that the 500 pages of threads will be archived and be accessible.
I think they are important for preserving Canadian chess history – content, opinions and personalities.
For example, I have enjoyed the Great Chess Quotes thread. It runs about 15 pages now. I would like to save those pages as a pdf document and then print them out and have them bound together as a booklet.
I can save an individual page of the thread but is there a mechanism by which I can download the whole 15 pages at once and then convert them to a pdf document?
Wayne, what you would need is a so-called "web crawler" that is customized to go through all pages of a vBulletin thread and store the data from each post cumulatively, with all revelant data such as OP, post #, date etc. I did a rudimentary search on whether such a web crawler exists and didn't find any mention of one, but a more exhaustive search could still be done.
Alternatively, vBulletin does store its data in a database that has a specific API. You could ask Larry (if he's ok with your request) to find out if anyone here on ChessTalk could research the API, find out what calls are necessary to extract such thread data, and maybe even do it if Larry trusts that person enough to give log-in credentials (I'm assuming Larry himself is not knowing that information, he has professed on more than one occasion not to be a 'computer guy'...).
A third alternative is that 15 pages isn't that much to do manually.... copy and paste page-by-page into your favourite word processor such as Word and later convert to pdf.... but the original tree structure of the postings would be lost with this method.
A final alternative is that perhaps.... there's an app for that!
Good luck.... your own threads on many events are also worth preserving!
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
From what I gather, a month from now the ChessTalk website could be sold and there is no guarantee that the 500 pages of threads will be archived and be accessible.
I think they are important for preserving Canadian chess history – content, opinions and personalities.
For example, I have enjoyed the Great Chess Quotes thread. It runs about 15 pages now. I would like to save those pages as a pdf document and then print them out and have them bound together as a booklet.
I can save an individual page of the thread but is there a mechanism by which I can download the whole 15 pages at once and then convert them to a pdf document?
I doubt the site will be sold any time soon. It's worth more up and than sold and either possibly closed, or having a change in ownership.
It's a forum... any thread that gets people yapping is a good buzz to promote the site. And that's what this smells like.
I have seen some torrents that purport to show all of the contents at a web-site. In my experience they were never complete but did have lots of files. We need something better than that. Conceptually this shouldn't be that hard to do, and my experience with software tells me that if the need is palpable then someone probably already has a solution. In a certain sense all we need do is create a mirror of the existing ChessTalk site and then somehow "seal it in amber." In other words the mirror should allow us to search for and read past posts but never alter them (read-only). Not disssimilar to any large folder backup, or archive. Ideally such archives should be created at the end of each month or quarter or year. Unlike the old days, storage space is not an issue.
I have seen some torrents that purport to show all of the contents at a web-site. In my experience they were never complete but did have lots of files. We need something better than that. Conceptually this shouldn't be that hard to do, and my experience with software tells me that if the need is palpable then someone probably already has a solution. In a certain sense all we need do is create a mirror of the existing ChessTalk site and then somehow "seal it in amber." In other words the mirror should allow us to search for and read past posts but never alter them (read-only). Not disssimilar to any large folder backup, or archive. Ideally such archives should be created at the end of each month or quarter or year. Unlike the old days, storage space is not an issue.
Right, Gordon, this is what I was meaning when I mentioned vBulletin having an API to get this done. It's a fancy database, and it probably has a function for backing up a read-only copy of the database (i.e. taking a snapshot). Someone with enough knowledge of vBulletin could do it, but they would have to have access to the actual ChessTalk vBulletin database. The hosting company might do it, but would probably charge a fee for that.
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
Larry can preserve the contents on a hard drive somewhere. For a while the ghosts of the posts will circulate and be somewhat accessible through wayback and google but over time they will take on the appearance of swiss cheese and entropy will rule in the end. I remember certain people waxing eloquent about how students would study the brilliant postings on usenet and be astounded decades in the future. Its mostly gone now less than a decade after its last throes. A pity but there are worse things happening and that have happened. This too shall pass for good or ill. Enjoy what you have now.
I decided to try to copy one thread and see what I could do to make a hard copy.
Great Chess Quotes runs 16 “screens” long. It has just over 300 entries.
With my web browser (Safari) I used a function in the pull-down menu under FILE called Export as PDF. I did the 16 pages one-by-one, which took no time at all. I numbered each of the individual files and deposited them in a desktop folder I called Quotes.
I found that I had 16 pdf files, which I was able to combine using Adobe Acrobat into a single binder. There were 167 document pages in it and the size was 3.6 MB.
There was a lot of waste space, so I went back into the thread again and saved the pages as pdf, as above, but I turned on Show Printable Version under Thread Tools. This gave a much more concise version which had 125 document pages and the size was 1.4 MB.
I then added a cover page, a blank second page and then saved everything to a USB key.
This morning I went in to the copy shop around the corner, handed the attendant the USB key and asked to have the whole thing printed up.
It is now a volume with Cerlox binding and a clear plastic cover. The printing is on every page. The total cost was about $14.00. Diagrams and URL links were preserved.
Some have questioned if ChessTalk threads have any lasting value. I think they have for the content, the personalities, and the history of the entries.
I don’t think electronically, however they are backed up, that they will last as long as a hard copy. Now I have a handsome volume for my shelves and for my collection.
I made a single copy for my personal use. I am aware that some people might say that there are copyright issues. I feel as long is there is one copy for myself alone and that I never try to sell it, that that shouldn’t be a problem.
As a matter of practice, I have WORD docs of everything I put in ChessTalk but, of course, they don’t have the responses of other authors. This seems the best way to me, to preserve chess history.
What is next? Well, there are a couple of obituaries I would like to preserve, recent games, some tournaments and one in particular that I laughed my head off at “Chess Will Shrink Your Brian” (Oct. 2014). Can’t let that go into oblivion after September 15.
Reposted September 22, 2016
(The ChessTalk Forum crashed twice in September and the contents from August 15 on were lost!)
Last edited by Wayne Komer; Thursday, 10th November, 2016, 01:22 AM.
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