Mega Tokyo AGI forums backup

[lance.ewing]

That is old enough for the old MegaTokyo forums. If only they were still accessible.

Stuart George has a backup from 2004 that he says he'll check the contents of before handing over. Apparently it is a dump of the whole DB.

Stuart George has sent through a backup of the old Meka Tokyo forums data, i.e. the backup referred to in the quote above. I haven't yet had a chance to look at the data, but I thought I'd get the discussion started about what we think would be the best way to make this available again on the Internet in read only form. It would be ideal if it could be included as part of this sciprogramming site, but I'm not familiar with hosting forums and forum software, so not sure what would be involved and whether that would technically work out or not. Does sciprogramming.com use the same forum software?

I'll take a look at the file now and see what the names of the DB tables are.

[lance.ewing]

According to the Wayback Machine, the mega-tokyo forums were hosted on YaBB (Yet Another Bulletin Board system), which a quick search tells me is a Perl based BB system. That doesn't sound right though because the URLs have php in them.

Edit: Aha! It's not YaBB but YaBB SE.

Edit 2: And YaBB SE went on to become SMF, which is what sciprogramming.com is using, right?

Edit 3: This is list of the tables for those who are familiar with forum software:

tblbanned
tblboards
tblcalendar
tblcalendar_holiday
tblcategories
tblcensor
tblinstant_messages
tbllog_activity
tbllog_banned
tbllog_boards
tbllog_clicks
tbllog_errors
tbllog_floodcontrol
tbllog_karma
tbllog_mark_read
tbllog_mark_read_copy
tbllog_online
tbllog_topics
tblmembergroups
tblmembers
tblmessages
tblpolls
tblreserved_names
tblsettings
tbltopics

[Kawa]

This is SMF, yes. I wonder if there's any chance of finding my old crap? I never did find my old QfG and MMBN battle systems...

[lance.ewing]

+--------+----------+-------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+------------+-----------+----------+----------------+---------------------+-------+
| ID_CAT | ID_BOARD | name                          | description                                                                                     | moderators                     | boardOrder | numTopics | numPosts | isAnnouncement | notifyAnnouncements | count |
+--------+----------+-------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+------------+-----------+----------+----------------+---------------------+-------+
|      3 |        4 | AGI Games, Fan and Commercial | Stuck in a Sierra game? Writing a fan based game? Just want to talk about AGI? Discuss it here  | df,sonneveld,AGI1122           |          1 |       966 |     8848 |              0 |                   0 |     0 |
|      3 |        5 | SCI Games, Fan and Commercial | Got questions about Sierra SCI Games? or how about creating your own SCI games with SCI Studio? | sonneveld,Brian_Provinciano,df |          2 |       737 |     4977 |              0 |                   0 |     0 |
+--------+----------+-------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+------------+-----------+----------+----------------+---------------------+-------+

Under the AGI board, there are 966 topics and 8848 posts. Under SCI there are 737 topics and 4977 posts. The sciprogramming AGI board pales in insignificance when compared with these numbers.

[Kawa]

All things considered, that does not surprise me.

[MusicallyInspired]

Could it be integrated into these forums in locked/read only subcategory? That's best case scenario, I'd say. Otherwise, maybe a separate link from the SCI Programming main site.

[lance.ewing]

I haven't asked Stuart yet what version of the software he was using, but several things suggest version 1.4.1 of YaBB SE.

The first of those is the following capture on the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030203174103/http://www.mega-tokyo.com/forum/index.php

If you hover over the link at the bottom to the YaBB SE web site, it includes the version of YaBB, which it gives as 1.4.1.

I've also been through the 1.4.1 code base and the sql script exactly matches the table structures of what Stuart sent me. So I think that asking him that question would just be a formality. It seems highly likely he'd confirm 1.4.1 is the version. I did notice that some of the earlier captures on the Wayback Machine were using 1.3.0, so it looks like he upgraded at least once.

Although the SMF database table structure is quite similar to YaBB SE, there are quite a number of differences. I did notice that there were some conversion scripts to convert from YaBB SE to SMF, so perhaps those would be useful. Maybe YaBB SE 1.4.1 could be installed somewhere, the MT forums data backup script loaded, the YaBB SE to SMF upgrade script run on top of that to convert to SMF, confirm it is all working, and then export that again for inclusion in to the sciprogramming.com forums somehow?

[Kawa]

Or one could generate statics of the relevant threads. Might be the neater solution, considering things like user accounts and such. Hell, pass me the dump and I'll do it in a day or two, including hosting.

[lance.ewing]

Yeah, that'd be great actually. Grab it from here (and anyone else who wants to attempt to do something with it):

https://sites.google.com/site/agifans/files/mt_forums.zip

It seems YaBB SE 1.4.1 won't run on the latest version of PHP and mysql anyway, which isn't surprising I guess. The SQL script above works fine with the latest mysql, but the script that comes with YaBB SE 1.4.1 needs some minor tweaks to change the TYPE=MyISAM to be ENGINE=MyISAM.

When I tried to install and run YaBB SE 1.4.1, I got this error: 

8192: Function split() is deprecated
(/var/www/html/forum/Sources/Subs.php ln 650)

The readme recommends this version of PHP:

PHP 4.0.4  -  Unix Platforms
PHP 4.1.x  -  Win32 Platforms

So if someone was going to try getting it running as it was at the time the export was done (in 2004), then they might have to use an older PHP. Either that or tweak the php scripts until they work.

[Kawa]

I've nothing to do tomorrow so good night and thanks for the link.

[Collector]

There seems to be a YaBB SE to SMF database3 converter here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?P=8d2c58b6e9b4aed24d8af22cd436f11d&topic=140776.0

I would say to convert it to import into a clean SMF install and then the threads could be imported here.

[Collector]

Too bad that there is not a backup of the images and attachments, too.

[lance.ewing]

There seems to be a YaBB SE to SMF database3 converter here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?P=8d2c58b6e9b4aed24d8af22cd436f11d&topic=140776.0

Worth a shot. Reading through that page, I see that Chris Cromer was involved in the discussion.

[lance.ewing]

Actually, using the converter was my initial plan. I'd seen the converter already in this location:

http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters;software=yabbse

I've just tried running it and the first page assumes that you have both SMF and YaBB SE installations that it can look at. It has a field for each where you must specify the path to the install. So I'm assuming that getting the exported data working under YaBB SE is probably the first step. The converter is for version 1.5.x.  So perhaps given the data is from 1.4.1, we'd need to get it working on 1.4.1 first and then upgrade that to 1.5.x and then run the convert script.

[Kawa]

http://helmet.kafuka.org/megatokyo/

First pass, need a better BBCode parser.