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[Maximum Spin]

Given that you are just calling a separate program, this seems excessively elaborate for the equivalent of

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/bash
for id in $@ ; do url="https://quicktopic.com/53/H/$id?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page" ; echo "archiving $url" ; archiver $url ; echo "archived" ;  donewhich doesn't even need such a crappy language as Ruby

[webadict]

I agree with webadict, Discord is robust and ubiquitous enough to serve quicktopic's purpose, maybe except with one caveat. If we use a shared server with hidden channels for each game, there is still the question of its transparency of user activity. Simply being a member there could be a tell, for example.

This could be circumvented partially: Membership is a requirement of playing. If you don't join, you don't play. Easy peasy.

[Vector]

I agree with this last point. In fact, I imagine that it could make sense to have people In on Discord.

[Skynet]

Real life has prevented me from doing much work, and we only have one week before December 11th hits and Quicktopic shuts down. Only really got time this evening to work on this. Even worse, I was only able to archive *most* of Page 2 this eveing - Internet Archive had timed out on me numerous times, and there is still this annoying lag for certain pages. heydude6, how many pages have you been able to archive since then?

EDIT: I have found an issue in my script - the quicktopic for https://www.quicktopic.com/46/H/gDy5hwicixg is, well, 46/H instead of 53/H, so my script breaks when trying to archive this quicktopic. This is somewhat okay, most urls uses 53/H and the ones that don't, well, they can be manually saved. But it's still very annoying to deal with. This is why manual verification is important when dealing with this Quicktopic archival.

[heydude6]

Last week was a hell of schoolwork. It was that final sprint of project deadlines and tests before the peaceful exam study period. On the bright side, this upcoming week is entirely free. I'm gonna try to turn these last few days into my fulltime job for a bit. I plan on posting a progress report on Monday. I wanna see if I can get 9 additional pages done that day. I did three pages in a single evening, so I'm hoping to be able to triple my output if I dedicate an entire day to it.

I'll tell you how it goes. I've been really dying to get back to this.

[Skynet]

I finished archiving page 3 (mostly, still some pages take a while to save and may require me to attempt to save them multiple times, but I can come back and test them out later).

I noticed that some URLs now are prefixed with 52/H instead of 53/H. So since the prefix varies, and probably varies much more than I expected, I modified the script so you need to pass in two parameters - the "id" and the "prefix" number that comes before the id (you don't need to pass in the "/H" though; I don't think that varies, though I was wrong before).

That way, we can better handle URLs that don't use 53/H. (My guess is that the prefixes auto increment in some fashion, so lower prefixes are associated with older quicktopics. It's just a guess though.)

To test the modified script out, I saved a few quicktopics on Page 4:
- Not-So-Beginner Mafia, Scum Chat - https://web.archive.org/web/20211205165217/https://quicktopic.com/52/H/rAysr5HCqA4S?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page
- Not-So-Beginner Mafia, Dead Chat - https://web.archive.org/web/20211205165328/https://quicktopic.com/52/H/rjaQeZauAhcd?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page
- Proc Gen Mafia 2, Scum Chat - https://web.archive.org/web/20211205165044/https://quicktopic.com/52/H/hcRMnEgTg6S?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page
- Proc Gen Mafia 2, Spectator Longue - https://web.archive.org/web/20211205165010/https://quicktopic.com/52/H/qadqFvdUtVLG?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page

And it worked. And I also tested it with 53/H links as well. Let's hope this will be the last modification we'll have to do.

I also modified the script to generate a link to the web.archive.org snapshots, simply as a good way to quickly validate the save. It's not exactly clickable within the repl.it's interface, so you'd still have to copy and paste. But at least it's all there for you to look at.

I plan on posting a progress report on Monday. I wanna see if I can get 9 additional pages done that day. I did three pages in a single evening, so I'm hoping to be able to triple my output if I dedicate an entire day to it.

I look forward to reading this progress report. It's a long slog, but if we can get this done, we will successfully preserve an important part of Bay12Mafia's history.

[Vector]

I will handle my own games as soon as finals end on Wednesday. Someone should really make sure to get the Notable Games Archive.

[TolyK]

If we can get the Notable Games Archive, or really any other games, I would later be able to "weave in" the posts from QuickTopic into the Bay12Forums posts. I have the ability to parse the Bay12 posts anyways. I'd try this week, but I'm really swamped right before the holidays. :/

[Skynet]

Took me about 40 minutes to get most of page 4 processed, except for two things:
- this QuickTopic found in this post of "Fallacy's BYOR 4: We're Done Here" doesn't seem to work at all - it gives me a white screen if I visit the page directly.
- I found no quicktopics at all in Maximum Spin's Dark Secret game, despite the fact that they're multiple scum factions. IcyTea31 even mentioned speaking in a quicktopic, just never bothered linking to it. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

When I get more free time later this evening, I'll probably start processing the quicktopics in the Notable Games Archive, so that even if we aren't able to archive everything, we'll at least archive a significant chunk of our history.

[Mephansteras]

Thanks for all the work on this, everyone!

[heydude6]

So small update on the whole monday thing. Some last minute REALLY IMPORTANT school stuff came up, so I will be spending this Monday working on that instead of archival. I'll be able to start archival tomorrow, but this is definitely a disappointing turn of events considering how close we are to the deadline and how every day counts now.


To reply to skynet's query's, I was part of "Fallacy's BYOR 4". The quicktopic link Persus posted didn't work even back then. I don't know how the PM quote function failed to copy the quicktopic link properly, but it thankfully isn't the biggest loss.

If a thread is missing quicktopic links, it might be a good idea to PM former game members who are still active on the forums and ask them if they could dig through their PMs and fish them up. The PM Search function is quite useful for that. I PMed Kashyyk trying to get access to the scum chat for Kingmaker mafia and though it turned out that game didn't  have a scum chat despite having a dead chat, Kashyyk was still have happy to help and it was thanks to his search that we even found out there was no scum quicktopic.

I might be a wise idea to gather a list of multiple inquiries though and then PM the person. They might get annoyed if we PMed them over-and-over again for each game they happened to be a part in.

NINJAED

[Maximum Spin]

- I found no quicktopics at all in Maximum Spin's Dark Secret game, despite the fact that they're multiple scum factions. IcyTea31 even mentioned speaking in a quicktopic, just never bothered linking to it. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

Yeah, I just had no idea people would, like, want those afterward. I didn't even keep copies of the PMs I sent out. Hold on though, lemme grep my browser profiles, I might have them in the history of whichever one I used still.
Hey okay I think I found all five of them. I mean, I definitely found five, I think that's all of them. Just so we're clear, it wasn't so much "multiple scum factions" as "everyone was in a scum faction", so there was one for each arbitrarily-assigned pair of players except for secret player webadict.
https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/RERwFJ8Vj9R9Z
https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/RWuvggEJvbm
https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/wUUFpM7fcQdg
https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/JpGKASm73d6wb
https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/X3wUcrX3GCTD

Man, I should never have even been allowed to use a computer much less run mafia
ETAA:
Egan and Hector13
Fallacy and Deus Asmoth
IcyTea31 and Doomchild
randomgenericusername and Tricmagic
Thanatos Russ and rockeater
There, now nobody can say I didn't help!

[heydude6]

You deserve a medal dude! I remember finding your game being quite the entertaining read back in the day. It was always a shame that you never got to see how the guys in the private discussions reacted to the madness, but now we can finally know!

I hope others will be as helpful as you were if I need to ask them to dig up some old quicktopics.

[heydude6]

Couldn't decide whether to post or not, but I don't want people thinking that I'm a coward who goes back on his word.

That Monday crap I was talking about, complete garbage! Ate up my entire life well into Tuesday. I wasn't even able to finish the task before the deadline, but at least I'll get part marks for what I did do. Anyway, I absolutely HATED getting that curveball thrown at me, but it's over now, for better or for worse.

Tomorrow I'll finally be able to start working on this!

And that's all I'll say cause otherwise I won't be able to contain my rage.

[Skynet]

Thanks Maximum Secret for the links. I backed up Dark Secret as well as most of Page 5 (the few remaining quicktopics are still in the "data lag" phase). I did try processing the quicktopics in the Notable Games Archive, and I processed a lot of them...but I also missed a couple of them too late at night, and many of them require manual saving. It's probably just easier to just go through the forum, saving page by page, without discrimination on its notability. That being said, if we are running extremely low on time and we can't save everything (which is a real possibility), then I'll go back to the Notable Games Archive and save what I can.

It's okay heydude6, real life has intervened to cause problems for everyone.

Right now, we have 5 pages by me + 3 pages by you = 8 pages. Considering we have 33 pages to archive entirely, we only have 24% of the forum archived. Assuming I get 1 page archived per day, and you gets 9 pages archived per day, we would be able to process 10 pages per day in total. So after Wednesday, we would have 18 pages archived, and after Thursday, we would have 28 pages archived. I will not be able to do anything on Friday, but if you can do work on Friday, then you would have archived all of the publicly available quicktopics on this forum.

That being said, doing work on Friday is cutting it close, especially since I think the site will turn off entirely on Saturday (I could be wrong, and maybe they'll turn off the site at the end of Saturday...but I rather assume the worst than hope for the best). Another curveball could shut down the whole project entirely. But it is doable, and as for the stuff we can't get, that's okay...at least most data is still accessible.

If you can do less, then we need to adjust our strategy. And if it turns out you can do more, that's even better!

Also, I updated the repl.it's script to produce a direct, clickable link to Internet Archive. Turns out that repl.it cannot make links like

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https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://quicktopic.com/53/H/dqvc7nwNYxHM?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page

clickable...but it can make links like

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https://web.archive.org/web/https://quicktopic.com/53/H/dqvc7nwNYxHM?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page

clickable. The former links shows all snapshots available, while the latter link gives you the most recent snapshot by default. Since we just want to make sure that a snapshot is available, I am now generating links using the latter format. This now makes validating the archival process much more simpler, which is good because I've seen some sporadic failures that needed to be resolved (mostly by attempting to save the link again).
---
Also, while going through the Notable Games Archive, I found this stuff:

No quicktopic found for Not-So-Beginner Mafia: Panda Edition (by Pandarsenic).

Dead chat quicktopic was found on Paranormal Mafia - Round 13 (by Meph), but no scum chat.

No quicktopic found for Time Travel Mafia (by Servant Corps)
- Servant Corps was an old account of mine, so in theory, I could try to recover the quicktopic for this game, if I remember my old account's information. I'll see what I can do about that, but I want to focus more on backing stuff up.

EDIT: My priority right now is to try to save what topics are publicly available, and then if there is time, reach out to those who may have access to quicktopics that are not available to the public. Some quicktopics may not be possible to archive, at least within the limited time we have, and that's okay. Let's save what we can.