POPUW Topic

Prince of Persia related subjects that do not have their own boards.
Andrew
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Re: POPUW Topic

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A simple web search indicates the tables involved. There are ready-made scripts as well, such as this one or this one. Lots of open source importers available too for admins looking to switch to alternatives from phpBB, which can be modified to export to a flat file instead.

Ultimately whatever the forum used has to be one of the major DBs (PostgreSQL/SQLite/MySQL/Oracle/SQL Server/...) and if cmdline utils are an issue then there are visual tools available for all of them that can allow the relevant tables to be selected and exported, or all non-essential tables (such as those with private data for example) to be deleted.

Can't suggest anything specifically since I know nothing about the DB used, but it's hard to believe that someone really interested wouldn't find a way to get this done over the last more than half a decade.
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Norbert
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:A simple web search indicates the tables involved.
Which ones are they? If you tell me, I'll try to run the Princed Forum export from the administration control panel again with just those tables, to check if the end result includes what we want and excludes what we don't want.
Andrew wrote:There are ready-made scripts as well, such as [...]
Non-official scripts are tricky though.
I would feel the need to look through their exports every single time to make sure the scripts didn't misbehave.
And that might be time-consuming.
Andrew wrote:Lots of open source importers available too for admins looking to switch to alternatives from phpBB, which can be modified to export to a flat file instead.
Sounds like a lot of work.
Andrew wrote:[...], but it's hard to believe that someone really interested
Yes, clearly Jalal is currently not interested enough in doing it.
It's possible that he has plans to put the forum back on-line; that he wants to do that instead of export stuff.
Which might mean doing a bit more work and thus he feels less inclined to go for it.
You could contact him with a kind e-mail, to explain how useful you believe some of the data might be.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Norbert wrote:Which ones are they? If you tell me, I'll try to run the Princed Forum export from the administration control panel again with just those tables, to check if the end result includes what we want and excludes what we don't want.
The topics and posts tables mentioned on the official wiki look promising.
Norbert wrote:It's possible that he has plans to put the forum back on-line; that he wants to do that instead of export stuff.
Somehow I don't see that happening, and even if he does it one fine day, why would any of the active community members want to migrate again?
Norbert wrote:You could contact him with a kind e-mail, to explain how useful you believe some of the data might be.
Look, it's not as if he doesn't know how dismayed we all were at the forum being taken down without prior warning. It's not as if he doesn't know just how much useful info had been shared on the forum. It's not as if he hasn't been made aware many, many times how we'd all love to see the forum archive with our posts released. There's a difference between making polite requests a couple of times and begging as if one's asking for a handout. There's nothing I can possibly tell him by e-mail or otherwise that would be news to him, and let's face it, it's not as if reading a mail from me is going to magically jump-start a process that stalled 5+ years back, is it?

Bah, forget it. If this forum's still around I'll ask again in 2020 about the progress made. Who knows, maybe it'll be like Duke Nukem Forever and surprise us one day. Question is, will anybody care by then? :roll:
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:The topics and posts tables mentioned on the official wiki look promising.
Meh, obviously I can also make informed guesses.
I'll ask about it on their IRC channel, and I'll see what I can do.
Andrew wrote:Question is, will anybody care by then?
I, for one, already haven't cared for a long time.
At this point in time we should have almost everything of any importance readily accessible elsewhere.
Sure, you recently found that potions thing, but that's probably more an exception that proves the rule.
And besides, in the future everyone will be using SDLPoP anyways. ;)
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Norbert wrote:Meh, obviously I can also make informed guesses.
Looking at that list, what else could it be? Why not run a simple SQL select on a join of both and see what you get?
Norbert wrote:I, for one, already haven't cared for a long time.
At this point in time we should have almost everything of any importance readily accessible elsewhere.
I still miss some gems that htamas, the hex editing expert before David, shared there. BTW, were you a member of the PoPUW forum? I honestly don't recall ever interacting with you there.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:I still miss some gems that htamas, the hex editing expert before David, shared there.
His 2008 e-mail address is mentioned publicly here and I think it still works.
You could contact him and ask him to replicate some of the most useful things.
If he has looked into certain things in the past, it may take him less time to redo these particular things.
Andrew wrote:BTW, were you a member of the PoPUW forum?
Briefly. See also my first answer here.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Norbert wrote:His 2008 e-mail address is mentioned publicly here and I think it still works.
If this is him I doubt he has any time to spare for PoP now. I'll ask if perhaps he noted down all his findings somewhere though.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:
Norbert wrote:Meh, obviously I can also make informed guesses.
Looking at that list, what else could it be? Why not run a simple SQL select on a join of both and see what you get?
When I export just phpbb_posts and phpbb_topics, I get an 8.8MB SQL file. It's not usable out of the box, unfortunately. It includes, among other things, an poster_ip column. There are also post_reported, post_delete_time, post_delete_reason, post_delete_user, topic_delete_time, topic_posts_unapproved, topic_posts_softdelete, all of which seem to indicate the table(s) may contain data that's not meant to be distributed and shared publicly.

The easiest thing would be an official phpBB "public" export feature.
https://wiki.phpbb.com/Get_Involved#Creating_New_RFCs
"Currently phpBB 3.1 is feature frozen, meaning no new RFCs are accepted. An exception is an RFC that is a prerequisite for another RFC which is already accepted."
New RFCs for phpBB 3.2 can be posted here:
http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=108

I feel like I've put enough effort into this. I'm already making off-site backups and I'm keeping princed.org (including the forum and wiki) up and running, plus my own popot.org including mods, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot. So if you feel like there should be additional backups, maybe you could post the RFC at phpbb.com. Or run a wget. Or whatever else you prefer to do.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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If I had direct access to the DB I'd have either used the first (official) script I linked to, or simply exported just the public topic and post data, probably using a view or temp table if required. The topic title, post subject & date/time, poster name and actual BBcoded text are all that's needed. Anyway, you seem to have a lot on your plate and the site owner is MIA so forget about it. I just hope leeching huge sections of the site doesn't have the hoster up in arms.
Last edited by Andrew on December 17th, 2015, 1:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Norbert
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:I just hope leeching huge sections of the site doesn't have the hoster up in arms.
I'm curious how large that backup will turn out to be. Please let us know when you're done.
If it's not too large, you could create a topic and attach the backup to a post every couple of days or weeks.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Well, it's not gonna happen this month in any case since I've already uploaded/downloaded a lot.

Just how large can post attachments be anyway? And how much space is there on the server for user uploaded files?
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Andrew wrote:Just how large can post attachments be anyway? And how much space is there on the server for user uploaded files?
It's max. 5MB per attached file, ten attachments allowed per post, 2GB space total (200MB or so in use).
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Re: POPUW Topic

Post by Falcury »

Norbert wrote:
Andrew wrote:Just how large can post attachments be anyway? And how much space is there on the server for user uploaded files?
It's max. 5MB per attached file, ten attachments allowed per post, 2GB space total (200MB or so in use).
Ah, now I feel kind of guilty for uploading all those 4.5MB SDLPoP ZIP files...
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Falcury wrote:Ah, now I feel kind of guilty for uploading all those 4.5MB SDLPoP ZIP files...
Lots of space available still before old versions might need to be purged, and in any case as long as it's SDLPoP I don't see anyone complaining.
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Re: POPUW Topic

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Several updates on May 2nd.
http://popuw.com/news.html
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