Hm…I have no idea how hard that query would be to write (My database knowledge is limited to plodding my way through Microsoft Access and not much further) but how would you get the internal tags: ones like {url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139869&pagenumber=2”}this{/url} to work, when you’ve renamed all the threads and gotten rid of the page numbers? I’m not trying to be snarky here, but as someone who’d like a copy of an archive, I think it would be useless without working hyperlinks.
YEA! Houston, we have contact. Welcome aboard the good ship “It can be done” Anthracite. The data dictionary and ERD are exactly what we’d need to start with. We’d need to co-ordinate with the SDMB admins to determine which, if any, changes were made to the default structures to be sure we got everything we need, but since we don’t need much, it should be a reasonably simple SQL call. Each row of the table, one row = one post, could be marked up, then appended to the master file for that threadID. Start with the OP, mark it up, translate vBcode into HTML, then start the master file for that thread. Replies get loaded, marked up, then appended to the end of the file. Between each reply we close all tags and do some cleanup. We also write the postID anchor so direct linking to posts can still work. All of this is the same stuff vBulletin does when it writes the HTML for a thread, but we wouldn’t bother with the reply box at the bottom or the “Report to Moderator” and such.
Fenris, as part of the marking up of each record before we append it to the thread, I’d suggest we put in a HTML Anchor for each post, just like vBulletin does when it generates the HTML for the pages it displays. In the case of page breaks, we could do something like this. Add an anchor called PageNumber=X into the code after between the 39th and the 40th post when we’re processing a thread. Then translate this
Then when the browser loads up that thread off the archive, it would jump straight to the pretend page seperation. Similar thing for direct post links.