Moderator gone missing

doinitsideways

Hi,

im just a member of a forum that the owner/moderator has all but disappeared...

we don’t want the forum to go down because they may have given up on it...

any ideas on what to do to keep our forum alive???

charrondev

I'd try and reach by email to the owner and see if anything can be done. If you can't get the assistance of the owner of the site it's pretty much impossible to transfer everything.

R_J

Given that something bad has happened to the owner, you might try to find out the postal address (with help of the whois service of the TLD) and send an oldfashioned letter. If really something bad has happened, maybe the family of the forum owner can assist.

In principle you would be able to crawl the page and rebuilt it with the public content, but that would be a tedious work. Yiu certainly would loose all conversations. And of course you do not get that domain.

rbrahmson

I wonder if feed/rss extract may be used to collect the data... (not trivial even if rss is enabled)

charrondev

@rbrahmson If you really want to scrape it would be easiest to use the APIv2. You likely won't be able to create an access token, but you can use a cookie for your user and that will give you all the permissions of your user.

See the API reference here or view the one in a Vanilla Dashboard you have access to.

https://docs.vanillaforums.com/help/apiv2/swagger/

If the site is running a very old version of Vanilla though, some or most of those endpoints won't be available.

Unfortunately with users you're pretty much out of luck. There's not good way to migrate those without access to the DB to bring over the hashed passwords, and scraping the users themselves would require Garden.Users.Add , Garden.Users.Edit , or Garden.Users.Delete permission which is not a standard permission.