Is there a relatively painless way to extract stuff from the Roll20 forum? I mean, I know I could go through each post I want to save and to a print-to-PDF of it or something, but …
(I don’t expect this forum to go away any time soon, mind you – but I’ve also had that three-years-later oh-shit-its-gone moment before, and there’s stuff here that I don’t want to lose.)
I figured as much. I’d certainly be interested in some sort of extraction tool (or, for that matter, just dealing with a big extract and pulling out the stuff I want). I do NOT want this to be any major effort on your part, Bill, unless you already have similar intent.
I also want to be respectful of other folks’ stuff.
Purely from my perspective, RTF files are probably a bit more convenient than HTML, both as file and as formatting, but HTML works (or even Markdown). Associated images definitely worthwhile. One file per thread would be great.
So we’ve seen slightly tuned demos of two forums: Vanilla and Discourse. There’s demo sites out there for things like phpBB as well, and more socially tuned or experimental sites like kune.cc.
Do people feel like we’ve found a winner in one of those two?
Do we want to look at some other project? If so, I can stand up a server for a couple days, if it’s not something Doyce can just cpanel into existence.
Do we have a favorite, but still have reservations about it that should be explored?
Have we decided Roll20 is okay after all?
The weekend is coming up, and if I’m going to do any work on something like this, the Saturday would be great for it. If we’re still thinking about it, that’s also cool.
Roll20 forums bring no value or synergy to Roll20 (vs any other forum), and given their known limitations, I’m good with bagging them.
Between Discourse and Vanilla, I lean more toward the former. It has a few weirdities, but I think they can be worked around (or, from what you were saying, Bill, there are mods which can deal with them). I don’t know that there’s another platform that’s significantly better (I’m sure each has its strengths and foibles), such that we need to research more.
So I vote Discourse (but without passionate fervor that this is the only possible choice I can live with).
Okay. Do we have a preferred domain name, either in existence or something I can register? Something that’s not totally likely to be blocked by oppressive work firewalls?
Menagerie.team is not currently blocked, by virtue of not being registered as anything at all with the not-so-great firewall - it still gives me a warning when I first hit the domain that it isn’t registered, isn’t to be trusted, and that all traffic there will be monitored, but… That’s true of all sites, all the time so whatever. Unless it’s reddit, there’s always a chance IT will eventually block it.
Randomaverage does the same thing, really. So whatever. I can test out any other domains to see if any of them go by without drama.