phpbb3-static

Requirements

1. php7.0-cli

2. php7.0-intl

3. php7.0-mysql (the converter only works with MySQL databases)

4. php7.0-dba

5. PEAR's HTML_BBCodeParser (https://pear.php.net/package/HTML_BBCodeParser2/)

   These commands worked in 2020:

    $ sudo apt-get install php7.3-cli php7.3-intl php7.3-mysql php7.3-dba
    $ sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net
    $ sudo pear install HTML_BBCodeParser2-0.1.0
    $ sudo chmod -R o+rX /usr/share/php/HTML
   

6. A running instance of your forum (read-only is fine).

Usage

1. In your forum, go to the control panel, server load section, and set the server load limit to zero, and session limit to zero.

   Otherwise the script won't manage to fetch all posts via HTTP, because it will be blocked by the forum. If this happens, the script will stop with an error.

2. In the forum administration, ensure that every forum sits in a top-level category forum. If there are top level forums, create a category forum "Forums" and set the parent of all top level forums to this category.

   The archive script currently only works correctly for forums which are a child of a category forum.

3. Make sure your forum uses the prosilver skin.

4. Clone this repository to an arbitrary location (not to the forum root!) and cd into it.

5. Copy config.php-example to config.php:

    $ cp config.php-example config.php
   

   Then, edit config.php and set your database configuration.

6. Run the scripts

    $ nice php extract.php
   

   You now have the forum-data.json file in the working directory.

   The script also creates forum-data_download_cache.dbm which is a cache of the downloaded pages. Re-running extract.php will not re-download the pages.

   Note: using nice will not overload your CPU when running this on a production system.

7. Extract HTML pages to the static/ directory and copy scripts and smilies:

    $ nice php legacy_write_html.php
   

8. [optional] Redirects from old URLs

   If you would like to preserve the old URLs and redirect to the archive, generate the file with redirection data:

    $ nice php generate_redirection_data.php
   

   The script will create redirection-data.php in the static/ directory. It will also copy viewforum.php and viewtopic.php there.

   If your old forum URL is different from the archive, you will need to copy these three files into the root of your old forum URL.

9. Point your browser to static/ directory

10. That's all :)

Bugs / known issues

• Cannot extract top-level forums with topics. Workaround: create a top level category forum and set the parent of all top level forums to that category forum.
• Usability issues: if you go from the list of topics to a topic and then go back, you'll lose your position in the list of forums, see issue #8.
• The code doesn't work with PHP5.
• The 16-years-old jquery was removed from the templates/res directory.

Maintenance of phpbb3-static

2020

We at bome have extended and used these scripts in August 2020 to archive forums running PHPBB 3.3.

2016

I used phpbb3-static in 2016, when I was making an archive of my old phpBB forum. I've finished this work, and I won't work on phpbb3-static any more.

phpbb3-static is bound to be maintained that way: somebody needs to archive a forum, they use the tool, make some changes and fixed, then they move on. I will allow phpbb3-static to sit in my repositories on Github, but I won't develop the project any more.

If there's a new feature you want, you'll have to implement it yourself, or pay someone else to do it. If you have any code changes to contribute, please send me a pull request.