Using the Wayback Machine to get old content

[Chris From Flurry]

Since we had a lot of paintball knowledge on the forums here that is now gone I was wondering if they could grab the info on a large scale from the Wayback Machine archive of the site? And then I was thinking that people that had old posts and info they wanted to keep could just go and grab it from there too. I just thought that might be a way some people could retrieve some stuff they wanted.

https://archive.org/web/

[tweeter4]

I am hoping the site designer enlists the help of someone who specializes in data scraping. You can recover massive amounts of historical data on Wayback

[Nish]

Llrpie knows his shit.

That said yes Wayback has a lot of stuff on there that you can go and get. I think I saw some as recent as December of last year.

Some things we will just have to be patient with. It's a learning process for us mods and it's a slow, steady and safe process for Llrpie.

[Grendel]

Only problem is scraping a thread based forum is not easy, you easily loose context when scrapping because it does not piece together the conversation.

I happen to be working with developers on scrapping our companies customer community forum for relevant quality data (I am a Field Quality Data Analyst at the moment) and it sounds easy but in fact is far from it. I am experimenting with developing a scrapper for Wayback in context of MCB right now which I can do but getting back the information and making useful sense are not synonymous.

[Cunha]

At this point are we certain that content is all 100% lost?

[Grendel]

Nope, it has been mentioned that Carter has backups just did not want to restore them and put everything back at risk. So there is a chance the backups could be compiled into a searchable archive.

[Nish]

At this point are we certain that content is all 100% lost?

My understanding is that it is not all lost

[Alexndl]

Its only been couple of days since the singularity, we will know more sooner or later

Sent from my SM-A205W using Tapatalk

[Diomedes]

That would be amazing, even if it wasn't "usable", just being able to search a static archive would be fantastic.

[Cunha]

I just have a hard time knowing why I can't really browse this forum effectively.

[gabe]

I just have a hard time knowing why I can't really browse this forum effectively.

Same here. It just feels awkward to use compared to the old site. Hopefully in time we can adapt to this layout.

Wish there was a "recent posts" button somewhere. Best I can find is "latest activity" which doesn't really catch but maybe a few new posts.

[Nish]

The "New Topics" option seems to be a good option so far. It's name is misleading. It picks up new posts in old threads as well.