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Two options: 1. Scrape it with wget or httrack or similar tool. 2. If the owners not really around it’s probably behind on its security patches, and there’s s

Two options: 1. Scrape it with wget or httrack or similar tool. 2. If the owners not really around it’s probably behind on its security patches, and there’s some relatively recent-ish vB exploits that would let you gain code execution and take a backup the “extremely illegal way” of the entire database, site, etc. I recommend 1, but 2 is amusing to ponder briefly over a coffee ;)

phire 3y ago
I've seen 2 done after the admin became uncooperative and kind of held the community forum hostage. They even went a step further, deleted all the old posts out of the database and setup a redirect to the new forum hosting. Very illegal, but very effective at solving the problem.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  No, deleting the original posts is not problem solving.
neilv 3y ago
Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real. Someone in a situation like this would be well-advised to instead direct creative energy at making option #1 work for you. (Example: Some kind of crawling/archiving, to capture a copy while you can, and then you can develop good scraping of the data out of your copy at your leisure, whether it ends up being scraped from archived HTML, JSON, XML, or whatever. There's a chance you need a bespoke/tweaked crawler, to avoid missing data, such as posts that are for some reason reachable by human in a Web browser, but not by a particular crawler, and then the consideration to keep in mind is to try to avoid doing something that might look like the bad kind of "hacking" to a non-technical person, even though you aren't bypassing authentication&authorization nor exploiting any vulnerabilities.)
- dotancohen 3y ago
  > Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real. HN has a worldwide reader base. In what countries would this not be illegal?

phire 3y ago

I've seen 2 done after the admin became uncooperative and kind of held the community forum hostage. They even went a step further, deleted all the old posts out of the database and setup a redirect to the new forum hosting. Very illegal, but very effective at solving the problem.

dotancohen 3y ago
No, deleting the original posts is not problem solving.

neilv 3y ago

Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real. Someone in a situation like this would be well-advised to instead direct creative energy at making option #1 work for you. (Example: Some kind of crawling/archiving, to capture a copy while you can, and then you can develop good scraping of the data out of your copy at your leisure, whether it ends up being scraped from archived HTML, JSON, XML, or whatever. There's a chance you need a bespoke/tweaked crawler, to avoid missing data, such as posts that are for some reason reachable by human in a Web browser, but not by a particular crawler, and then the consideration to keep in mind is to try to avoid doing something that might look like the bad kind of "hacking" to a non-technical person, even though you aren't bypassing authentication&authorization nor exploiting any vulnerabilities.)

dotancohen 3y ago
> Just to be perfectly clear to anyone who doesn't yet know, in the US, option #2 potentially involves federal prison, for real. HN has a worldwide reader base. In what countries would this not be illegal?