Kevin's Watch

I got to thinking about how much time I've put into making posts, how I've come to know myself through the process of articulating what I think. It would be a shame to lose all that if this site ever went down for good or had a major technical problem.

So is it possible? Can I download all my own posts?

+JMJ+

Zarathustra wrote:I got to thinking about how much time I've put into making posts, how I've come to know myself through the process of articulating what I think. It would be a shame to lose all that if this site ever went down for good or had a major technical problem.

So is it possible? Can I download all my own posts?

Aside from going through the Admins, the only method of which I'm aware would be to do a Search for Author: Zarathustra -- remembering to select Display Results As: Posts as well as Return First: All Available --, then Select All with your browser to copy the entire page, then paste onto a word processor doc, then remove all the extraneous bits of info, and then repeat for every page of the Search.

You have 375 pages.

Git-R-Done.

Damn, that's a good solution, Wos!

It may be a bit laborious, but done a bit at a time it is at least possible.

If there is no other feasible method, we could maybe organise a bit of a Watch effort and if a few people were involved we could divvy the work up and people could email the resulting downloads to you, Z.

u.

I appreciate the help. No thanks, U, I would not ask others to waste their time on something so unimportant. I just thought there might be an easy way, since it's just text and we do have a function to display all the posts of one user (as Wos points out). I didn't realize they could be displayed as posts. I've tried copy/paste before, but I had to go in and click on each post, so it took way too long. Wos's suggestion would speed it up considerably.

10+ years, 15,000+ posts and probably 10,000,000+ words may be unimportant to some people, but I recognise the value and effort involved

I'm sure you will manage, but if you need a hand the offer stands.

I look forward to the book, From Malik23 to Zarathustra - The Journey of the Ubermensch

u.

Sorry guys...even Wos' solution will not work. The "show all posts by user" function is limited to 7,500 posts, which is less than half of Z's total posts.

In theory, it should be possible for Vain to be able to export them from the DB. In theory anyway.

I'll ask him next time we chat.

--A

+JMJ+

Avatar wrote:Sorry guys...even Wos' solution will not work. The "show all posts by user" function is limited to 7,500 posts, which is less than half of Z's total posts.

In theory, it should be possible for Vain to be able to export them from the DB. In theory anyway.

I'll ask him next time we chat.

--A

Ah. I didn't realize that.

OTOH, one could further refine the parameters of the Search -- say, for example, by forum or by sub-forum (both of these options are available).

Then, as long as Z doesn't have more than 7500 posts in one sub-forum -- say, for example, the Think-Tank ...

Oh. Yeah. That might be a problem.

But even that could be overcome.

One could further refine the search by selecting Sort by: Ascending, which would collect the outliers by displaying the oldest posts first.

Then, as long as Z doesn't have more than 15,000 posts in the Tank, Bob's yer uncle.

Just send a letter to the NSA. I'm sure they have all of the data from this site backed up and would gladly help you.

Seriously, though, a long time ago (~10 years), I heard Google had the entire internet backed up (for their caching system), and a university somewhere was able to get all of their data back that they lost after a crash by asking Google for the backup. Kinda cool, actually. Not sure what their protocol is for that today.

-jay

Google does keep cached versions of all pages that are indexed, so I suppose technically it's possible. They're sorta like that old story about dinosaurs though...their brain moves so slowly it an take weeks for them to even realise you're talking to them, let alone do anything about it.

However, it might be possible to find all one's posts by doing a site: search for the author...maybe.

--A

It is fun going back and reading old posts and see how my thought process changed. I can see I've mellowed out on a lot of things.

HLT!

You should post and tell us about them.

--A

I don't need to retrieve all of my posts. About 95% of them are in the "ABC Creative Band Names" thread in Mallory's. The rest is me bitching about Star Wars continuity. I got the gist. No need to review.

I,m pretty sure my posts are copied archived in the Smithsonian.

Well, if not the Smithsonian, then perhaps at least the DHS...

--A

I always assumed my posts will be saved for the history books. never really thought about they would do it.