Static Site Snapshot/mirror, for storing on the Z Options

[speculatrix]

Just as you can get a snapshot of wikipedia and store on your PC (or even PDA), it occurred to me that a snapshot of the OESF forum would be a very useful thing if combined with free text search.

There's a huge amount of wisdom on it (a lot of which should be in the wiki, but isn't), and so an archive would be a real asset. The low-graphics version of course would be best, but provided the archive was created without the attachments, it'd be OK as there'd be only one copy of the site.

I did try a speed-throttled wget once, but it wasn't too satisfactory.

Any chance of considering being able to do this on the server itself and make a monthly snapshot downloadable in .zip or .tar.bz2? Some of us could burn CDs or DVDs to send to people without broad-band.

thanks
Paul

[ShiroiKuma]

I think it's not a very smart idea to download forums with a tool lik Htttrack. This forum is based on PHP scripts which interface to a database. Downloading with htttrack makes the forum engine generate thousands of pages, resulting in high usage and high traffic.

It should not be too hard to make the database available for download regularly in a compressed format. Then one would create scripts to serve the database locally on the Z...

[speculatrix]

I think it's not a very smart idea to download forums with a tool lik Htttrack. This forum is based on PHP scripts which interface to a database. Downloading with htttrack makes the forum engine generate thousands of pages, resulting in high usage and high traffic.

httrack has nice features to limit the load it puts on servers, and in fact the latest version has a restriction of 100kbps bandwidth use.

I made sure it restricted the number of parallel page fetches too, so that it too quite a while to download.

I've got building work on at home and they've cut the power again, so I can't access my fileserver and do the upload at the moment.