Old Forum Decommissioned 15 November 2017

Press F to pay respects to the old forums. I liked them. q.q

Worth noting that there is a complete backup at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu thanks to the person from https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/75abh9/release_old_forums_archive/

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:When we opened these new forums last month, we explained that we eventually would be shutting down the server that houses the old forums. On the morning of November 15, 2017, our technical crew will remove the old forums from the server and permanently shut down that hardware. Those of you who would like to preserve any content from the old forums should do so by November 14, 2017, as we will not be hosting an official archive of the old forums.

A few forum members have taken steps towards creating an archive of the old forums. We applaud their initiative and thank them for their efforts. Once one or more of these volunteers successfully archives the old forums, we will be happy to post a link to their archive. Forum archivists can contact us at Forums@Arena.Net to give us the URL information and let us know about the progress of their project.

Thanks for your support of the new forums, and for your understanding about the changes that are coming on November 15th.

Someone already has archived completely the old forums: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/

@"Gaile Gray.6029" said:That's great! I'm hoping to hear from that person directly so I know I have permission to post that link. It's privately hosted, so I want to show each archivist the courtesy of having them choose whether we link to them or not.

We've heard from a couple of people who were or are going to give this a try, and I'd love to share the link on these forums and on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki, as well.Not sure if the person wants to get known, looks like it was published by a "throw away" account.

@Malediktus.9250 said:

@"Gaile Gray.6029" said:That's great! I'm hoping to hear from that person directly so I know I have permission to post that link. It's privately hosted, so I want to show each archivist the courtesy of having them choose whether we link to them or not.

We've heard from a couple of people who were or are going to give this a try, and I'd love to share the link on these forums and on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki, as well.Not sure if the person wants to get known, looks like it was published by a "throw away" account.

I know very little about Reddit, and don't have an account. Here's the contact/information account, though: https://www.reddit.com/user/e-scrape-artist

Good luck.

It seems like the forums are hosted in Leningrad, Russia, but the e-escrape-artist guy said on reddit

Some of you may remember me from my previous thread, where I scraped the GW2 old forums into a database and posted it for download. I also called out for someone to make a website, mirroring the original forums, to provide a comfortable way of viewing the database. Nobody stood up to the task and so the idea was forgotten, until this thread reignited my desire to see it to its completion.

And so, after about a week worth of work, some ugly PHP code from someone who hasn't touched PHP in like 10 years, and some help from a friend with a way better internet connection than mine, I present you the web version of the archive, complete with all the attached screenshots, memes and DxDiag logs:https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu

It's a read-only snapshot of the forums; it exists solely to preserve the history of Guild Wars 2. You can't log in, create or edit posts etc, everything is presented "as is" and will see no alterations in the future.

Search feature is working, but prefer to search specific forums or threads, as the complete forums search takes quite a lot of time, and may even time you out entirely. I'm not sure what could be done with that.

(EDIT: Improved search performance, but it's still far from ideal)Wiki maintainers!

Feel free to change the links on wiki to point to this archive, as the original forums will allegedly be taken down at the end of October.

The archive should support all the URL formats the original forums supported, and thus all it takes to redirect a link to the archive is changing "https://forum-en.guildwars2.com" to "https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu", similarly for "fr", "de" and "es".

Contact me, if you encounter any problems with the links. Before the end of October, preferably. :D

The database from the previous reddit thread has since been updated with the following:

Topics and posts from the hidden ("archived") forums, that were only accessible via permalinks to logged in users;Data about which topics are "Q&A" and which posts are "questions" and "answers";Data about the popularity of posts (the "thumbs up" icon next to a post);344 pages of topics from "Fractals, Dungeons & Raids" that I somehow managed to miss.

All of the above is featured on the website, but, if you wish, you can download or torrent the patch to the database right there on the website.

Some facts, because facts are neat:

6,889,602 posts (1,290,079 of which (18%) come from archived forums)598,839 topics (118,177 of which (19%) come from archived forums)266,533 unique members (8933 of which posted in more than one language forum, 117 in more than two, and 35 in all four)294,894 posts contain the word "kitten" amounting to 4.28% of all posts, which is definitely less than I expected217,792 attachments weighing 106 GB (I think I may know the reason why they want to start from a clean slate...)Longest attachment file name: >DONTSPAMEMPERORS.......warning____make_someRise_of_the_sisters_and_DEATH_OF_THE_AIs_scenario_and_ia_versa_for__MAX_CONTROL........because_it_is_low_bughet_company.._afford..freshmen..cannot_overload_them...this_why_i_loose__STEAM.jpg (barely fits the 260 characters limit on Windows systems)178 posts longer than 21500 characters, 137 of which are developer posts, only 8 of which are not release notesThere are only 14,987 posts that were upvoted enough to display a "thumbs up" icon next to them, which is a measly 0.2% of all posts (there are 19 times more posts with "kitten"s than upvotes). And only 1620 among those were upvoted enough to show a star inside the "thumbs up" iconOldest post ever: 2012-08-26 20:31:46 UTC by Gaile GrayOldest non-dev post ever: 2012-09-04 22:05:57 UTC by Hellix.4125Last post: 2017-09-12 23:46:24 UTC by dragonborn.1278Forum forever inaccessible due to a path collision: PvP Events (was located at /forum/pvp/events, but then moved to /forum/archive/events as of this post, which is the same path that /forum/game/events "Dynamic Events" was moved to, making the former inaccessible)

It reads like the creator is fine with using it for wiki links.

Oh wow, I see someone else has beaten me (I have been running a crawler to archive it but it's not done yet)... And thanks @Gaile Gray.6029 for the notice. Gratz for the one who completed it for the initiative.

Some of you may remember me from my previous thread, where I scraped the GW2 old forums into a database and posted it for download. I also called out for someone to make a website, mirroring the original forums, to provide a comfortable way of viewing the database. Nobody stood up to the task and so the idea was forgotten, until this thread reignited my desire to see it to its completion.

If I even had followed stuff in reddit....

Old forums still have a lot of relevant information that can be googled regarding game content, questions, rates, events, etc.

I don't know what's the rush in shutting it down but hey, it must be taking up A LOT of resources!

RIP old forums.This new upstart is a bit 'all gong no dinner' for my taste, but w/e.

@"Gaile Gray.6029" said:Moving/porting the forum content isn't possible due to the code language in which it's created and the -- well, how do I say this? -- wonky system on the back end? :) Bottom line, we looked several times at a way in which we could keep the forums in read-only mode indefinitely, but we're just not going to be able to do that.

Yep, I can imagine the difficulty. If people there had not been able to fix the broken stuff (I believe mostly due the lack of support from the forum creator) let alone moving and making it work at another setup. Maybe the only option would be doing like me and others tried: crawl it and save the pages as raw HTML (plus images and stuff), not bothering with the original backend system that generated them. Raw HTML can be hosted in any system, from "pre-historic" to "post-modern" ones :tongue:

I found it funny the old forum search function seems to be working now. Maybe it just didn't like to cooperate when it was actually active. :)

@JustTrogdor.7892 said:I found it funny the old forum search function seems to be working now. Maybe it just didn't like to cooperate when it was actually active. :)

Possibly it works because it's a different system. The person that made that archived version must have done a new search engine for it instead using the original one (that only Anet or people at the back end had access).

@shadow.6174 said:

@JustTrogdor.7892 said:I found it funny the old forum search function seems to be working now. Maybe it just didn't like to cooperate when it was actually active. :)

I'm not talking about the archived version, I'm talking about the actual old forum. The search engine seems to work now.

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:It's not really resources, it's the fact that at some point -- sooner or later -- that server is going to topple over and die, and when it does, the outcomes won't be pretty. Moving/porting the forum content isn't possible due to the code language in which it's created and the -- well, how do I say this? -- wonky system on the back end? :) Bottom line, we looked several times at a way in which we could keep the forums in read-only mode indefinitely, but we're just not going to be able to do that. Regrettable, for sure, but it is what it is. I'm just glad we got over here on our new forum before things went south. :)

What would the code language have to do with porting content? If you build a forum (or use an off the shelf option), then it does not matter whether it is made with Java, PHP, Javascript/Node, etc, because the data is stored in fields in some sort of database as text, blobs, integers, etc and is not dependent on the coding language.

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

Bottom line, we looked several times at a way in which we could keep the forums in read-only mode indefinitely, but we're just not going to be able to do that. Regrettable, for sure, but it is what it is.In case you still consider hosting the old forum if it is technically feasable: I wrote you that I made a crawler that created completely static web pages from the whole forum.

No database backend, not dynamic features. Just plain .html pages with working links. You just have to unzip a ~90 GB .zip archive of .html and .jpg files into some directory on some web server, point a web server alias to that directory, and the archive of all 4 languages is online immediately. All pages with relative links, so it is not even important in what directory hierarchy level it is linked in.

If your techs want this *.zip, just tell me. In case you cannot accept a data heap from a foreign party due to security considerations, I can also provide the crawler so you can crawl and export the database yourself. It's a php script that will run fine under Linux CentOS 7.

@Silmar Alech.4305 said:@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

Bottom line, we looked several times at a way in which we could keep the forums in read-only mode indefinitely, but we're just not going to be able to do that. Regrettable, for sure, but it is what it is.In case you still consider hosting the old forum if it is technically feasable: I wrote you that I made a crawler that created completely static web pages from the whole forum.

In the grand scheme of things, the forums, while an important tool for ongoing communication, are pretty far down the list of priorities when it comes to a fun gaming experience - archived forums even more so.

I have no problem with relegating the forum posts of old to the recycle bin.

And, while were at it, thank you to @Gaile Gray.6029 for making the forums - both old and new - a slightly less toxic place to discuss things.

Ive come to prefer this one now, especially the speed and ease of use on a tablet. I particularly find the ‘x numberof new posts in a thread since last viewed’ feature invaluable.

@Malediktus.9250 said:Why would you write your own crawler? Programs like HTTrack exist and would do exactly that if you just want to have html + image files.Downloading stuff is the easiest part in creating an archive. To have a complete, consistent and proper archive with working inner links, you have to postprocess everything. The old forum is also not as clean and consistent as you might think. There are hidden archived parts, archived 2013, that should be made visible in a complete archive. The internal links, used by posters to cross-reference posts and threads within the forum, must be properly processed as well.

@Silmar Alech.4305 said:

@Malediktus.9250 said:Why would you write your own crawler? Programs like HTTrack exist and would do exactly that if you just want to have html + image files.Downloading stuff is the easiest part in creating an archive. To have a complete, consistent and proper archive with working inner links, you have to postprocess everything. The old forum is also not as clean and consistent as you might think. There are hidden archived parts, archived 2013, that should be made visible in a complete archive. The internal links, used by posters to cross-reference posts and threads within the forum, must be properly processed as well.Sounds exactly like what HTTrack willl do if configured correctly

@JustTrogdor.7892 said:

@shadow.6174 said:

@JustTrogdor.7892 said:I found it funny the old forum search function seems to be working now. Maybe it just didn't like to cooperate when it was actually active. :)

Lol, weird and I hadn't notice that, I haven't checked it much lately. In that case, I have no idea and apologize my mistake.

@Malediktus.9250 said:

@Silmar Alech.4305 said:

@Malediktus.9250 said:Why would you write your own crawler? Programs like HTTrack exist and would do exactly that if you just want to have html + image files.Downloading stuff is the easiest part in creating an archive. To have a complete, consistent and proper archive with working inner links, you have to postprocess everything. The old forum is also not as clean and consistent as you might think. There are hidden archived parts, archived 2013, that should be made visible in a complete archive. The internal links, used by posters to cross-reference posts and threads within the forum, must be properly processed as well.Sounds exactly like what HTTrack willl do if configured correctly

I have tried to do it with HTTrack and indeed it does that post-processing as you says. However, in my experience (maybe due some issue at my end) it wasn't reliable. After days of crawling it still didn't retrieve all pages, several pages were missing and links broken. Let alone assets that compose the visual, it wasn't able to construct a relative path (original forum used a full absolute path) to stylesheets and then the visual got broken.

Another option for that could be Heritrix, made and used by archive.org to crawl content for Wayback Machine. It's free to use and you can install it on your own system (I had been using it to try that). The only downside is it will retrieve the pages exactly as they are, then that post-processing with links would need to be made. Also it's not an all out-of-box setup and it would require several tweaks to get it to your needs.