Archive of old forum

[MOL]

Hi Phil

Before you close down the old forum, is it possible that you generate an archive with the old postings? Would be a shame if we would lose all that valuable information.

Thx
MOL

[Phil Harvey]

The old forum should stay available, but I have been wanting to archive all of the posts in this forum anyway to make searching easier.  I will do this if I can figure out how.  I have all of the old posts as mail messages, and just need to figure out how to insert them into the SMF mysql database.

- Phil

[MOL]

Thanks, Phil. Just saw that you have added a new 'Archives' section.

MOL

[Phil Harvey]

I finally got the old forum posts archived here.  Initially I didn't want to risk messing up the mysql database so I wrote a Perl script to get all the old posts via HTTP GET and add them to this forum with HTTP POST.  The whole script was written but I couldn't get the silly PHPSESSID working -- the server kept saying that my PHP session expired -- probably some security thing.

So in the end I was forced to write my first PHP script to submit the new posts directly to the mysql database (after GET-ing them from the CPAN Forum via HTTP).  As expected, this resulted in a number of database inconsistencies, but I used the SMF forum utilities to repair these and I think all is well now.

- Phil