State of the Scraper
03-30-2013, 02:05 AM
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!
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!