Bioware forums are closing

[Baaleos]

               

It would be great if someone could take the db I am making, and have it display at a new web site, like it was the bioware forums.

Eg: Being able to browse topics etc

 

The database structure I have implemented should make that possible.

 

It might be possible to write a script to migrate the ms sql db I am making to mysql and then have it displayed by an SMF forum.

Some pre-requisite steps would be needed.

Eg: Create dummy users for all the posters.

These get mapped to the posts (author)

Then its a simple case of creating topics, and then creating posts in those topics with the relevant data - which we already have.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Asymmetric]

               

Damn, that sucks. I think I'll need to take some the stuff I wrote, put it into some sort of custom content guide and upload it to the vault. At the least for inventory icons.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

The forums on the neverwintervault are active.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Killmonger]

               

:angry:Grrrr !

 

 

Bloody technocrats and their notions of new and improved....

 

It cost them very little and garners great loyalty to their brand over many years.

A centralized place that everyone (of many generations) can relate to, from numerous platforms.

No, instead, because of "progress" lets scatter the info to the four corners of the net and rely upon other "new" services to gather the data.

Stupid. 

 

 

After all these years,

I am irritated beyond description that Bioware would close these legacy forums.

 

Whatever can be salvaged from these forums needs to be protected and enshrined for future players.

 

A tremendous "Thank you" to all of you who have the technical skills to make it so.

 

Fantastic amounts of love and care have already gone into our beloved game(s).

It would be terrible to waste the enormous trove of technical know how that has been freely contributed by the community.

 

For myself, I am devoted to the Nwn experience.

There has not been another game like it since it was published.

It is not surprising that the powers that be would like it obscured.

Let us confound them.

Long live Nwn

 

I implore the community at large to widely communicate solutions to this problem and enact them quickly.

I shall always support my game community any way that I can.

But let us work together in a co-ordinated manner.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Just another update.

I left it running to about 60% completion, but then saw that it was consuming like 600mb of memory.

Microsoft tells you 'oh you don't have to worry about memory management, the .Net framework does it for you.....'

But they lie!!

 

Working with .Net List<> objects- iterating through them in a foreach() statement prevents you from disposing of them - freeing memory.

So I changed it to be more array like.

Eg: Instead of foreach() I am now doing for(i=0;i<sub.topics.count;i++){ Topic t = sub.topics; }

 

The benefit of this is that I can actually dispose of the 'Topic' classes when I am finished committing them to a database.

Now the memory management seems to be a lot cleaner. It goes up and down from 40mb to 80mb, but always returns to around 40-50.

In addition, I have increased the parallel thread count to 25, so it can work on up to 25 topics simultaneously.

So it should be able to reacquire where it was before I turned it off earlier soon.

It was about 60% earlier when I turned it off (after 5 hours of working), I just turned it back on about 10 minutes ago and its about 15% complete.

Further more - it will download offline copies of the Posts to the hdd - so it doesn't have to constantly go back to the bioware forums to grab the information.

This is particularly useful for the top and resume functionality.

 

There has been a lot of messages asking for it to be run against Neverwinter Nights 2 forums.

I will see if I can get it setup to work on those forums too.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

 

Im running the Nwn 1 Archive on my server, while doing the Nwn2 archive on my desktop.

Its going fast enough, just started the Nwn2 archive and its already about 5-8% done? (guessing based on the % bar)

It has less topics, but possibly more posts.

 

The data for Nwn2 is being put into a separate DB from the Nwn1 - so we can work with them separately.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

OldTimeRadio confirms that if we can scrape content in html format, he will be able to load it into the Omnibus when time permits.

 

This doesn't preclude other archives, too, of course.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Neverwinter_Knight77]

               I don't remember whether I ever retrieved my NWN CD keys.  I think I did, but in case anyone forgets, now's the time (just don't ask me how, cuz I don't remember).
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Empyre65]

               

I don't remember whether I ever retrieved my NWN CD keys. I think I did, but in case anyone forgets, now's the time (just don't ask me how, cuz I don't remember).

That became impossible years ago when the old forums went down.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

The scraper is starting to annoy me now.

Both the NWN1 and NWN2 scrape jobs finished, for some reason, it only captured 50% of the topics.

It is weird, it is like exactly 50% of the topics, not 57% or 34%, its like 50% on the dot.

There must be some sort of logic issue in my code.

 

As for the Omnibus - im capturing the html content of each post - so it should be possible to string it all together to construct a topic page.

Eg: I am not capturing the html content of a full page, I am literally capturing the html content between the start of one post and the begining of the next post.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Im such an idiot - I was doing a for(i=0;i<= ;i++)  loop, and inside the loop, I was still doing i++  - which means that every other topic was being missed.

Duh...

Should have everything scraped soon.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

wget is your friend, right? don't ignore your friend.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Im just using WebClient.DownloadString(); Lol

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_azaz1234]

               

I suggest the new vault as the best place for future discussion.

 

It's controlled by the NWN community. Most of us are there already.

 

The Nexus isn't a friendly place, in my experience. I don't think a relatively open community like ours would feel welcome there.

 

The forums on the neverwintervault are active.

 

yes, my mistake. for some reason i think of the new vault as playing as similar role as its predecessor -- hosting content but not well suited to forums. but you're right, it could be the ideal place, and the forums are active.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Cassandra Saturn]

               guys, you can go to http://biowaresocial...ork.boards.net/ our new home '>