Topic: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down (Read 61826 times)

heydude6 · « **Reply #60 on:** December 09, 2021, 07:41:52 pm »

I don't know if Vector started archiving yet, but based on the rate at which I'm making progress, I'll probably make it to page 19 today.

As a result, I want to make an announcement.

If Skynet sticks to his rate, as well as quits on Friday like he said he would, then he would have finished pages 1-7 by the end of today. By they end of today, I will have finished pages 33-19.

That leaves us with 12 pages that need to be archived by the end of Friday, not counting whatever work Vector accomplishes today.

I will certainly be able to do my 6 like I always have, but that leaves another 6 unclaimed and unaccounted for. Some of that will certainly be done by Vector, but I wonder if that will be enough.

Long story short. There are 6 pages I need volunteers to archive between Thursday and Friday. Vector will archive a currently unknown amount.

For me, it takes on average 2 hours to manually archive a single page, though I'm a very thorough guy. So if 6 volunteers are willing to give up 2 hours of their time. Or 3 volunteers are willing to give up 2 hours today and 2 hours tomorrow, then we can do this!

Hell we can even have a situation where two volunteers spend two hours today, 4 hours tomorrow! And one of them is probably Vector. In that situation we literally only need one more person to be able to complete this archive! Will you be the one?

The least painful option I think is 3 volunteers (one of them being Vector), each doing one page Thursday, and Friday.

Anyway, what do you say? Have I swayed anybody? You will be a hero if you do this.

If I have, post a reply in this thread. I'll immediately give you a page number to work on (and an optional bonus page) and we can get to preserving this sub-forum.

In light of this new analysis though, I want to revise the directions I gave to Vector last time. Start at page 10 and work towards the oldest (ie. do 10, then 11, 12 etc). I want to see how much Skynet does before I start assigning people to pages 8 and 9.

Skynet · « **Reply #61 on:** December 10, 2021, 02:38:51 am »

Page 7 is finished.

If I do get time, I'll try to archive one more page, but I will not make any promises on that line - assume I "quit" until I post otherwise. I would appreciate any help we can get, in the hopes that we can archive everything by Friday.

Of course, Quicktopic could decide to stay open on Saturday...but I rather not want to rely on such an event happening, because after all, it's supposed to shut down on Saturday, and it's unclear whether it means exactly on the beginning of Saturday or at the end of it. If Quicktopic does stays open on Saturday, then heydude6 can archive the remaining pages on that day, and everything is saved, more or less.

webadict · « **Reply #62 on:** December 10, 2021, 03:25:37 am »

I'm afraid I don't have time to help or I would. If I do get time, I'll try, but I'm currently away from my main computer, so 1 hour per page would not be correct for me.

heydude6 · « **Reply #63 on:** December 10, 2021, 06:28:48 am »

So, it's time to for my end of day report again. To make do with the lack of new volunteers, I pushed myself to archive 9 pages today. This is not a magic trick I'll be able to perform on Friday. I stayed up till 4:30 AM to do that and I don't think quicktopic will be around if I try it again.

The result though is this: I now only need 3 pages to be archived volunteers. The newer pages are quicker to archive since you don't have to hunt around for missing chats as much.

I have managed to message or get into contact with everyone I mentioned in my Day 1 report, except for Vector regarding Vector's Bastard Mafia Game. JoshuaFH did not reply to my PM, though he was online today, so I assume he doesn't want to help save Weirdo Mafia. Sad, but nothing you can do about it.

I know Webadict just mentioned his technical issues, but unfortunately there are many missing chats that only he has access to that I'd like to get ahold of. Even if Webadict could only provide a few, I'd be incredibly grateful for that. Due to the amount of games he's involved in, it would leave quite a big hole if we let the quicktopics disappear.

Spoiler: The Webadict request list (click to show/hide)

Since I probably won't be able to make a big request like this at the end of Friday, I'll need to think of a way to ask for missing quicktopic links in a timely matter. I can probably just post requests in the thread/PM as they come up, but I think it is necessary to be a bit proactive with Webadict's games. So I skimmed through the rest of them to see if I found any issues

Spoiler: Proactive Webadict (click to show/hide)

There were only two thankfully.

Anyway, this was a lot to put onto one person and I feel incredibly bad about doing it, but it needed to be said for the sake of our archival efforts. Every bit helps

Meph, could you confirm whether Cybrid Mafia had a dead chat since you died in it?

I Pmed Toaster to ask him for the imperial quicktopic chat in Cybrid Mafia II - Welcome to hell, the glitches have landed.. Manipulating was apparently a core part of his strategy in that game.

Here is some stuff that is probably lost forever.

The Dead chat of Hangman - Game Over - Is it hanged or hung? Mafia win! assuming it has one

Anything to with Bay 12 Mafia - Night Three - Low Resolution - 2 replacements needed. Gm is absent and topic is locked. No lead on who could be scum. It wasn't a notable game, but it was a big one. A shame

Don't know what to do about BYOR: Choices.

I have a little bit of hope for this one, BYOT mafia: Night 2 - 13/19 alive - Delicious A lot of the players here are still around. One might be former scum and could provide a scum topic

A notable game as well unfortunately Not-So-Beginner Mafia: Panda Edition [Day 2, 7/9]

Quote from: Pandarsenic on April 01, 2011, 11:57:00 am

On a final note, I had a lot of fun with this and I hope everyone else did, too. Lastly, this link to the Google Doc I used for this game has all the PMs and day flavor unless I cocked up making it accessible:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ap5KzVfSPGdSdGVsRXZSMklEZnQ1R3hqU3k4ZFBZM2c&hl=en&authkey=CLSZzvcM

Yes you did Panda. It may have been accessible in the past, but it isn't anymore.

Quote from: Toaster on October 10, 2010, 09:18:44 pm

Better to let your game die than let the thread be locked forever.

Yes indeed Toaster. Yes indeed.

Good night everyone. See you in the morning.

TolyK · « **Reply #64 on:** December 10, 2021, 07:27:51 am »

Hey guys, I, uh, am making a python script to scrape one's PMs and find Quicktopic links.

TolyK · « **Reply #65 on:** December 10, 2021, 08:04:26 am »

ToonyMan · « **Reply #66 on:** December 10, 2021, 08:24:43 am »

Hangman - I don't have anything besides the scumchat
Bay 12 Mafia - I was town and don't have anything, game stalled and died
BYOT Mafia - I was town and don't have anything, Pandar runs things weird

I could ask Leafsnail today if he could trowl his PMs for Hangman and Bay 12 Mafia, although that depends on if he's busy or feels like doing it.

TolyK · « **Reply #67 on:** December 10, 2021, 08:27:36 am »

You know what, instead of manually internet archiving, we could just... download all the pages, no?

I'm almost done with a script to do this automagically. I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier...

TolyK · « **Reply #68 on:** December 10, 2021, 08:57:07 am »

ETA for reading all Bay12 Mafia subforum posts is like 1-2 hours (I am self-rate-limiting to Bay12 forums), after that I might end up spamming QuickTopic servers a bit to download the HTML files of all the quicktopics. I just hope QuickTopic doesn't have rate-limiting, seeing as they're shutting down tomorrow...

Code: [Select]

Loading all subforum threads...
 100.0% [================================================>]  33/ 33 eta [00:00]  
Found 652 threads.
Reading PMs...
Reading forum posts...
   7.1% [===>                                           ]  46/652 eta [1:05:54]

webadict · « **Reply #69 on:** December 10, 2021, 09:12:20 am »

Some help on the missing ones while at work:

I was scum in at least one of those, possibly more. I'll get links after work for all those.
The scumchat was posted in the spreadsheet linked for the notable game NSBM, which Vector appears to have quoted and therefore might have the link!

Skynet · « **Reply #70 on:** December 10, 2021, 09:24:53 am »

Quote from: TolyK on December 10, 2021, 08:27:36 am

You know what, instead of manually internet archiving, we could just... download all the pages, no?

I think the issue then is trying to upload the HTML pages somewhere so they'd be accessible via a simple URL (bay12quick.com/_____), so no one needs to download the whole zip file. And if Internet Archive is providing free web hosting, why not use that?

However, yeah, a Python script would probably be better than whatever we were doing for the last few days. There is a Python package that does upload URLs to Internet Archive - https://github.com/agude/wayback-machine-archiver .

Perhaps you could submit all the URLs to them? Granted, most of these URLs have already been archived manually or semi-manually already, so you just need to archive 3 pages...which, I think, are pages 8-10? But if it's faster to just submit all the quicktopic URLs again so be it.

I guess you could configure your script to only scrape quicktopic URLs within that range, and then format them in the proper template -

Code: [Select]

https://quicktopic.com/[PREFIX]/H/[ID]?o=0&range=all&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page
Of course, you need to generate the URL anyway to properly acquire the full Quicktopic HTML, so it shouldn't be just hard to throw that URL off to Internet Archive as well.

Only catch is that you'll have to manually check to make sure the archival process have worked, because there's been situations where a page doesn't get archived, meaning you'd have to try again (so far, I've tried this manually, but presumably this could be done automatically if you can detect when it fails).

TolyK · « **Reply #71 on:** December 10, 2021, 09:45:37 am »

Yep I'm currently getting all quicktopic urls ever mentioned anywhere in Bay12 Mafia history, and in my own PMs.

Then I add this suffix to the paths:

Code: [Select]

"?o=1&range=all&m1=1&mN=149&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page"

wayback-machine-archiver seems really cool, I'll try submitting to that in parallel. It mentions "submitting Github Pages" but I assume it will work for all pages.

Skynet · « **Reply #72 on:** December 10, 2021, 09:46:07 am »

Quote from: TolyK on December 10, 2021, 09:45:37 am

Yep I'm currently getting all quicktopic urls ever mentioned anywhere in Bay12 Mafia history, and in my own PMs.

Then I add this suffix to the paths:

Code: [Select]
"?o=1&range=all&m1=1&mN=149&print=1&submit=Show+printable+page"
wayback-machine-archiver seems really cool, I'll try submitting to that in parallel. It mentions "submitting Github Pages" but I assume it will work for all pages.

It'll work for all pages.

EDIT: I'm a little concerned about the m1 and mN parameters. It's possible quicktopic ignores both of them when you write "range=all", but I have not tested that. So far, I omitted both m1 and mN parameters and saw no problems thus far.

TolyK · « **Reply #73 on:** December 10, 2021, 09:49:22 am »

Cool, I'll do that then.

BTW, I eventually want to create a "viewer" that merges bay12forum posts and private communication (quicktopic or whatever later) into one readable thread, for maximum game enjoyment.

Should be relatively easy to do since we can already parse threads, though not necessarily in terms of building the viewer itself.

heydude6 · « **Reply #74 on:** December 10, 2021, 10:28:14 am »

Quote from: Skynet on December 10, 2021, 09:24:53 am

However, yeah, a Python script would probably be better than whatever we were doing for the last few days.

Having archived 18 pages, I have to disagree with this sentiment. The problem with scripts is that they aren’t complete substitutes for a human brain. A script won’t notice players talk about being masons, in a game where no mason quicktopics were posted and then realize to contact someone to get that lost quicktopic.

The webadict section of my last post would not exist if I just used scripts to do my work. And that wouldn’t be a good thing.

Quote from: Skynet on December 10, 2021, 09:24:53 am

I think the issue then is trying to upload the HTML pages somewhere so they'd be accessible via a simple URL (bay12quick.com/_____), so no one needs to download the whole zip file. And if Internet Archive is providing free web hosting, why not use that?

You’ve hit the nail on the head skynet. To give even more information, my final vision for how this archival process will go is that I want to give those who browse bay12 mafia games in the future, as seamless an experience as they enjoy now. To that extent, I was hoping to get Meph to agree to use his moderator powers to edit old links and replace them with new wayback machine links, so it would be like nothing ever happened. You could design a bot to do it.

I was hoping to announce this after all of my work has been done cause it’s hella ambitious (it needs more fanfare), but I don’t want people to doubt my current methods. Doing these edits will be a slow process, but the need won’t be as urgent this time. Just as long as it gets done eventually.

Anyway, it seems like I’m awake now. I’m gonna get back to work. It may not be as flashy as writing a script Tolyk, but with so few pages left, I think it’ll be better if you just publicly claimed a page in this thread and archived it by hand. Pages 10, 9, and 8 are up for grabs

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Author Topic: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down (Read 61826 times)

heydude6

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

Skynet

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

webadict

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

heydude6

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

ToonyMan

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

webadict

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

Skynet

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

Skynet

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

TolyK

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down

heydude6

Re: Oh jeez, Quicktopic is shutting down