State of the Scraper

As many of you know, a number of people have, for whatever reason, recently decided to come over to Eagle Time as a supplement to (or replacement for) MSPA. (Welcome, people!) One of the more common requests is a method for bringing over forum adventures or games from MSPA. Many of us put quite a bit of time into MSPAFAs, Grand Battles, and numerous other things, and we don't want to lose them just because some admin decides that they're not brand-supporting enough and gives them the axe.

That's where Technology comes in. I've been hard at work in my lab, cooking up a brew that will help soothe the pain of manual transfer, and I have a plan: Read threads off of MSPA and shove them bodily into Eagle Time's database.

The software to make this happen is coming along nicely. I've got much of it working, and there are just a few spots left that need to be filled in before it's ready for testing and deployment.

One of the largest missing pieces? You. In order to bring threads over, they need to be posted by an account, and I'm sure you'd love to have posts you made there be linked to your account here. In order to do that, I need your MSPA username, your Eagle Time username, and your Eagle Time User ID (which is the number in the database that's more permanently tied to you than your username).

To gather that information, I've created a form (LEGEND OF ZELDA: A LINK TO THE FORM). All you have to do is go to it, stick in the information, and go have some pizza. (Pizza is neither necessary nor provided.) With any luck, I'll have the rest of the software worked out in the next few days, testing can begin early next week, and deployment can begin a few days after that.

If you have any questions or thoughts, you can get them to me here, in IRC, via PM, or by IPoAC. I'll get to them as soon as I'm not neck-deep in database documentation and being sociable with my relatives!

Yaaaay this is exciting and excellent and I give my thanks again for your hard work on this!

Okay, but are you sure we shouldn't be calling this the Eagle Claw?

In that case, mayhaps even the Eagle's Talon!

Pinary, you are incredible and your work is magnificent. 8D

Is there anything preventing someone from copying over a thread that they didn't personally start? (Or to a completely different persons' ET account for that matter?)

The only thing preventing people from running wild with the tool and scraping the entirety of MSPA over here will be self-restraint. Well, that and a lack of access.

(Being an administrator over here is necessary for the actual performing of the scrape. The process will be "Give Pinary or Schazer link(s) to the topic(s) you want scraped(s), they will put the link in the machine and it will go.")

[Submeeted :3]

Submitt'd.

Pinary, pizza is absolutely necessary for the grieving. Lynch: Pinary for not providing the pizza, especially since it's my birthday on the day the games subforum is axed.

submitty
yeahhhhh

pizza time

Hrm. I don't know whether or not to do so because I post extremely sparingly in that particular board.

The only thing I'm confused by is what will happen to posts made by people that are there but not here.

Like, will there be proxy accounts or just you masquerading as them? And if there are indeed mock accounts for those people, what if those people later decide to come to Eagle Time?

The accounts OTTO and GBCE are going to be handed any posts not made by people registered in the scraper. All scraped posts will say who originally made them (there's going to be a standard first line that says all the useful details). Due to the way things work, unless there's a really, really fantastic reason to allocate someone their posts later, it won't be done. It'll involve dumb code at that point, and it's not likely to be worth it.

Submitted. Thanks for this.

Will I be able to update my adventure both here and at the MSPAForums? Part of me wants to high tail it the fuck outta there as soon as possible, part of me wants to stick around for the MSPAFA awards.

that thing you described has in fact happened

Solaris where's my refund.

By geography, I've done it