Bioware forums

[Specialpatrol]

Any way to rip/copy threads on the Bioware forums, and possibly transfer them here, before they are deleted?

Lots of useful stuff in those pages...

[bueggeroff]

That's a crap ton of stuff to shift nd the devs have more important things to do right now.

I'm currently copy pasting like a demon loads of quest data which I'm going to organise in a pdf with screenshots I took of quest completion, NPCs, landmarks etc.

Anyone who wants info that's on the official site, or other sites I would suggest do the same. (I may ask you for it later on.)

It's likely these other sites will shut down their WAR support at some point. ZAM turned theirs off 3 days before the close down. Taking away my current only good source for text on the PQs.

[Specialpatrol]

Yeah, I wasn't really aiming it at the devs - but more the general community here.

Was just wondering if there were some smart way of saving offline copies of threads (besides taking screenshots of every page) which then possibly could be copy-pasted into these forums.

And awesome, if you're already in the process of salvaging stuff!

[bueggeroff]

I'm actually doing it as source material to work out ideas for the pen and paper RPG. But what I'm getting together will probably be of interest to people playing the game so I'm happy to share it. It won't be a full and complete guide, but I'm happy to expand it that way if people are prepared to do some leg work.

If there is a quicker way of getting this info I'd be interested too, I'm having to go through page at a time and copy paste the text into Quark. I know there is software that can mirror websites. I tried it with Hammerwiki usinga piece of software and it did a pretty crappy job of it. There was loads it didn't pick up and I ended up with about 8 gb of temp files I had to manually delete.

[Laeti]

That's a crap ton of stuff to shift nd the devs have more important things to do right now.

I'm currently copy pasting like a demon loads of quest data which I'm going to organise in a pdf with screenshots I took of quest completion, NPCs, landmarks etc.

Anyone who wants info that's on the official site, or other sites I would suggest do the same. (I may ask you for it later on.)

It's likely these other sites will shut down their WAR support at some point. ZAM turned theirs off 3 days before the close down. Taking away my current only good source for text on the PQs.

I always used Zam and this one http://war.mmodb.com/items/
too bad Zam's off=( Had a really good db there=(

[bueggeroff]

Yeh ZAM was proper organised, mob & NPC locations on maps, all descriptive text for PQ. No other site even came close. Doubt they'd turn it back on just for our use though.

MMODB is massively lacking on info for destro side but it has quite a lot of info, It's one of the man sources for my project. And as it still has pages up for Tabula Rasa I an't too worried the WAR stuff is gonna go down.

This site is good too http://warhammer.gamepressure.com/. I have screenshotted most of this stuff already in game, it's mostly just what's in the ToK, but if it's still up when I'm done with other stuff I'll grab that too.

[Bruglir]

I've backed up all my combat formula stuff. i'll post it here.

viewtopic.php?f=54&t=305

[Warhammerfan2007]

You can still access some of the ZAM data using archive.org.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131027180 ... uest=49616

No maps with locations on them but you can, at the very least, copy the quest text.

EDIT: Just took a bullet and asked someone on Stackexchange about how one would go about archiving a whole forum.
Earned me -2 reputation and the following answer

Is there any way? Sure, there are plenty of ways. Using something like httrack or even just wget is simple enough. That gets you a local static copy... But the process takes a long time and it's probably going to look like an attack to any server admins, and it might even get you blocked.

The technically hard part is parsing the HTML and turning that back into something usable. For what it's worth, I'd use Python and a Python library called BeautifulSoup but you could use whatever language you like... It's all very possible but it's not a trivial job.

I should also point out that you'll have no right to redistribute the content anywhere. If you're planning on putting this site online, you'll be infringing on both the original posters' and Bioware/EA's copyrights.

Really thought there were some better tools for the job, but apparently people are still sticking to httrack and wget.

Will take eons to archive a whole forum like that.

[bueggeroff]

You can still access some of the ZAM data using archive.org.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131027180 ... uest=49616

No maps with locations on them but you can, at the very least, copy the quest text.

EDIT: Just took a bullet and asked someone on Stackexchange about how one would go about archiving a whole forum.
Earned me -2 reputation and the following answer

Is there any way? Sure, there are plenty of ways. Using something like httrack or even just wget is simple enough. That gets you a local static copy... But the process takes a long time and it's probably going to look like an attack to any server admins, and it might even get you blocked.

The technically hard part is parsing the HTML and turning that back into something usable. For what it's worth, I'd use Python and a Python library called BeautifulSoup but you could use whatever language you like... It's all very possible but it's not a trivial job.

I should also point out that you'll have no right to redistribute the content anywhere. If you're planning on putting this site online, you'll be infringing on both the original posters' and Bioware/EA's copyrights.

Really thought there were some better tools for the job, but apparently people are still sticking to httrack and wget.

Will take eons to archive a whole forum like that.

You can have a big pile of +1 from me for that info, that link gets me exactly what I needed. Not having mob and NPC locations is a pain but with a hopefully fully functioning live server to play on I can figure enough out for my purposes.

I ran Httrack to archive Hammerwiki, it ran for about 4 days and the way it works if I'd shut down my machine or even lost my internet connection it would have had to start again. It created several gb of useless crap and only grabbed part of the content. Total waste of time and considering the risk that the admins might have IP banned me really not worth the bother. Of course there is the fact I probably didn't set it up right.

If there's specific info you or people want from the Bioware forums, like play and class guides etc I would copy paste that stuff now while you still have the chance.

[Warhammerfan2007]

Hehe, thanks. Good to know that it's valuable info to someone.

Do we even need NPC locations? Can't the position of every logged NPC be extrapolated from the sniffed packets?

As for Httrack. Wget would be exactly the same.
Was really hoping there was a way we could only parse for text, using a simple shell script.