As many of you know Answerbag shut down on December 15, 2015 without notice. Now ALL the questions and answers ever asked/answered were in the Answerbag archives going back to day one. If we had KNOWN IN ADVANCE Answerbag was going to fold is there any way we could have transferred our individual activities to our own computer data base? Obviously I know nothing about the inner workings of computers so I don't know if it would have been possible or if the question is ridiculous. If it is ridiculous please don't ridicule me. It's just that there is a lot of communication that occurred in those days with people I love who are no longer in my life for a variety of reasons, among them that some died. I would treasure being able to go back and read them again. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.
There are ways to PDF pages and PMs and save them to your computer, yes.
For people with nothing else to do, a tragedy, lol.
Realistically, AB would have had to have designed a program that let you download straight from the site, like EP did. I'd venture to guess that a skilled developer could create something that would go through all the data and pull yours out, but, man, the time it would take to create such a beast... You'd easily have to drop hundreds, if not thousands, to have a program that could comb it all and present it to you in a format you could read.
This is speculation on my part. I'm not a developer. From what I know, though, it could have theoretically been possible, but the expense probably would have made it not worth the effort for most people, unless a group split the costs.
You can browse the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151211032852/http://www.answerbag.com/ It only grabbed a few pages at a time, so you'd have to spend time looking at all the dates there to find what's relevant to you, but if you're missing people, that'll give you a walk down memory lane.
Really? Who are you anyway BS? All my Answerbag correspondence for years with Matt is there! I would give a lot to have the privilege of reading them again and again. I have nothing else to say to you. Nothing..
((hugs)) Thanks honey. I know even if such a ship were in port it already sailed. It's just that you know I was on Answerbag for many years and made some really good friends, a few of whom sadly have passed on. I would have loved to be able to read some of those chats again and again. Thank you for the link you provided and the helpful information JA. I appreciate that you took me seriously. By now you know I am a very serious person and when folks joke about things that mean a lot to me I throw them away. I have no use for them. No loss to me
. Happy Monday! :)
If you had easy access to all your activities (such as a "my activity" page that linked to every page you had commented on using an index) then yes, it would have been relatively simple to collect all that content and save it on your personal machine. This site has a page like that, but I can't speak to answerbag.
The answer depends on how easy it was for you to access the content you were interested in while the site was online. If it was difficult for you to get to then it would likely be difficult to automate the downloading of.
Hello Rosie:
The content belonged to them. But, if they were considerate, which they WEREN'T, they COULD have made your files available for download. It's a piece of cake - even for the technically impaired.
excon
That would have been so great excon. The folks with whom I became very good friends and all our chatting over the years was all there. A few of them died sadly. How precious would having that to read once in awhile be? So it would have been easy had they been thoughtful?. How they ended was so very rude. They could have done better than that. They should have done better than that. Thank you for your helpful answer my friend! :) In our case we have each other's email addreses
s so we can stay in touch if Answermug were to end. But in some cases I didn't have email addresses though that would be meaningless for those who died anyway. Oh well. Too soon old too late schmart! :(
They could have downloaded the entire database into an Excel file and emailed it to you so you could print it out.
Check out the Wayback Machine, Rosie. After I posted this, I started browsing the old AB and getting sentimental. So many people just disappeared with AB. Some, as you noted, are gone forever, but it's cool that a lot of discussions have been preserved by the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151211032852/http://www.answerbag.com/
You are correct about extracting content from the database, but it really wouldn't be that difficult to do assuming it's a MySQL database running on a Linux environment. It would just be a matter of creating a GUI that facilitated a MYSQLDUMP procedure via the www-data user on user information fields of the database and then deposited the comments into an output GUI form.
It sounds complicated but it's actually a relatively simple algorithm.
Thank you so much JA. Sincerely and seriously. I appreciate the additional info and the link. I'm going to check it out a bit later. I appreciate you more than you can ever know! Happy Tuesday! :) ((hugs))
That's what excon said as well CSV. Thank you for your reply m'dear and the helpful information. I have to be honest with you. Your answer is way over my head. I really don't understand it at all. I am quite ignorant about computers. I don't know what MySQL is. I have heard of Linux and thought that was an ancient and outdated computer language
and no longer in use. Whatever a GUI is is a mystery to me. But I thank you and Happy Tuesday! :)
Thank you for your helpful answer ITpro and Happy Tuesday. Of course I think that ship sailed in December of last year. It was just a thought I had along the lines of "wouldn't it be loverly?". :)
That sounds so easy MrB. So easy. Thank you for your reply and Happy Tuesday! :)
