I’m curious if there’s any program or web tool that allows for the quick compilation and saving of a forum thread (not necessarily from the SDMB). Say, for example, that I really wanted to save all the posts in the thread I love cheese… Recommend one? without having to manually copy/paste the text from each individual post.
I know I could save each web page as an HTML document, and that would actually be a pretty good solution, except that I’d rather not have each page as its own document. If that winds up being the way to go, is there a program or web tool that would allow for the saving of a bunch of pages as a single HTML document rather than having a hundred of them (in case of a long thread)?
In case you’re really curious, it’s because I want to save the various forum games I’ve run on this board and others, like this one.
Have you tried saving the printable version (accessed via thread tools). I think that only gives the option of 200 posts per document though, so not much better I guess.
You can also append that to the printable version (printthread.php instead of showthread.php) if you want a cleaner file to save without all the excess formatting.
These are handy tips, and they’ll help with the threads here on the Dope. Unfortunately the other forum I use for RPGs that I’d like to save threads from seems to have hardcapped the post-per-page limit at 20.
So still looking for more ideas for collating forum thread posts and pages.
Can you link to that other thread on the other forum? (so I can test the collating addons – there are a bunch of programs like that, but they don’t work across everything flawlessly)
If it’s this thread, the PageZipper addon for chrome works. Just click the addon’s next page button a few times until all the pages load (they’ll be appended to the bottom of the current page). You can then copy and paste the entire webpage into another program (word or a html editor), or print the whole thing to a PDF.
PageZipper seems to work great with relatively small numbers of pages/posts but when I try to save or copy/paste large amounts of stuff it breaks down, leaving huge sections of blank space where a lot of text should be (see here, taken from this thread - this gap of space exists even when saving the webpage directly). The mass copy/paste option seems the best way to go about it, given how it winds up looking in Word (which is to say, it doesn’t look horrible, and can save the images without having to have extra folders for them like with a saved webpage) but I may have to do it manually page-by-page.
Edit:
Sure, it’s this thread. I appreciate you giving me a hand.
Too late to edit: One advantage the saved-webpage route has is that it can display the spoilers properly. In Word it just displays the title of the spoiler - given how often spoilers are used it’s an issue.
Because of the way chrome addons work (I dunno the specifics), this is one of those rare things that Firefox might be able to do better. With the Repagination addon, you can load all the pages together: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/repagination/
