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

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.)