MMoudry

Hello All,

Few years ago the f4g site crashed and all data was lost. There was plethora of stories and reports written there. I've tried to recover the data from google cache and recovered about 1.5GB of data. However I have never gotten around to sorting it and doing anything meaningful with it.

The archive still sitting on my hard drive. It's around 1.5 GB and while doing cleaning I would like to get rid of it. If you know someone who might be interested in recovering it I would gladly burn a DVD and send it to them by regular mail in any format they would prefer (ie. XML). I will make a similar offer to several people I know from the community. If I don't hear from anyone 3 weeks from now I shall delete it.

The recovery algorithm was preicise, doing heuristic search of various threads and thread pages over google based on member names. I am confident that 95% of content was recovered. So far it is inside a MySQL database, I can convert it to any format for your convinience.

Thanks,

Murad

Corvak

did you try archive.org? Sometimes they have old web pages stored.

Tabbitha

I answered you on Skype Murad.I just need Adams advice on what will be the best format to get it in.

I know the player of Seriya de Lacey was desperate to get it way back when I asked you if you could retrieve any of it.She kept asking me if you had passed it on, so she will be very happy.

I am sure Adam will reply here and once he has I will send you an adress for the disc to go to .

Many thanks

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Adam

Heh wow, that's awesome.
Wonder if it'd be possible to import it into a forum.

Tabbitha

That would be the ultimate ending for it all to be put on,as there are SO Many rp stories and the history of Erpa and Core.

What would be the best format to have it burned to a disc ?

*drags Murad off Skype to speak to Adam *

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Adam

SQL would be fine, I'd certainly try me best to import it, but if it's a manual process, I'd need help lol

Tabbitha

Well of course and I would help as it would be just awesome to have it all back up again

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MMoudry

Adam,
I would say that importing it into a forum is possible and that was my ultimate goal when I set upon this endeavour. However, it is quite tedious work even for a programmer familiar with the vBulletin DB schema. I have personally no time to put into this due to my other engagements . I have estimated that this job would need around 40-50 man hours. If somebody else would like to pick up the beacon I'd be glad to consult on the current data format and the way I have devised to import it to a vBulletin schema.

Murad

Tabbitha

*watches as it all starts to go over her head now *.......:p

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MMoudry

well SQL is possible, however the data aren't normalized or even parsed. There is one line in the table per vBulletin 'page view' and inside the line one column that contains all the HTML code generated by the said page. One needs to write a script to match the page with the thread and parse out the various posts while matching them to various member names (if you decide to maintain the referential integrity with the names). The data are in brute state and not importable into any schema as is. Although I have made sure that all the necessary info for later parsing and matching is present.