How to Archive The Forza Forums YOURSELF!

[CosmicKitten593]

If you want to save all of the data on the Forza Forums before they go offline, there are a few things that you can do

• Use the Obsidian Web Clipper
• Request a copy of all your data
• Archive a specific post in the WayBack Machine
• Use HTTrack to save all of the Forza Forums

Use the Obsidian Web Clipper

The Obsidian Web Clipper is a tool that allows Obsidian users to save a webpage as a .md file that they can access offline. You can use that to save specific threads. To do it, you need to:

1. Download Obsidian Web Clipper. You can download it for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Brave.
   

   

2. Visit the post you want to save

3. Download Obsidian for Windows here, for Android here and Linux here
   

   

4. Open the post you wish to save

5. Open the Obsidian Web Clipper and click ‘Add to Obsidian’
   

   

6. It will open as a .md file that you can then read and edit.

Request A copy of your data

Archive a specific post

Using the WayBack Machine to archive a specific post is probably the easiest option out of all of these. you need to:

1. Download the WayBack Machine browser extension. For Firefox, or Chrome, Edge, or Brave.

   
   

2. Visit the post you want saved

3. Open the WayBack Machine extension

4. Click ‘Save Page Now’

   

5. You can then visit it in the WayBack machine on The Internet Archive!

   

Use HTTrack to save ALL of Forza Forums

You can use an app called HTTrack to download all of the information that you can find on Forza Forums without an account (So all posts, users, catagories .etc) Be aware that it can take a very long time. Here's what you need to do:

1. Download HTTrack from here.

2. Run the downloaded .exe file. Click through all the prompts

   

3. Once you open HTTrack, click NEXT.

4. Type in what you’d like for the final file to be called. Put that in the boxes labeled ‘Project Name’ and ‘Project Category’. You can call them anything you want. Then in ‘Base Path’ you can choose where you want it to be saved. Make sure what drive you pick has a lot of spare storage. After you fill all of them out, click NEXT

   

5. There’s a drop-down menu titled ‘Action’. It should have ‘Download web site(s)’ selected by default, but if it doesn’t, make sure to select that option.

6. In the box that’s titled ‘Web Adresses: (URL)’ type in https://www.forums.forza.net/. Make sure that you add https and www. in because otherwise it will not work.

   

7. Click the box with ‘Set Options’ on it.

8. Click on the tab that says ‘spider’. There’s a drop-down menu there that says ‘follow robots.txt rules’. Change that to ‘no robots.txt rules’. Then go over to the tab that says ‘Flow Control’. Set the ‘Number of Connections’ to 3.

   

9. Click ‘okay’ on the pop-up menu

![image|690x373](upload://nj3zK96ccP9Htyh1mPZi7AdF3yy.png)

11. Then click the NEXT button, and then the Finish button.

12. Wait. This will take a very long time, and make sure not to shut down your PC until it is done.

    

13. You’re all done now! If you want, you can upload it to the Internet Archive, or keep it for yourself

[e_yes]

I would highly encourage people to do this themselves, it takes about 10 minutes of active time and then let it run overnight. You can even have it setup so that it shuts down your computer once it’s done.

OR if you just want to archive the posts run these command(s):

cd the\directory\you\want\to\download\it\to\ (Windows)
cd the/directory/you/want/to/download/it/to/(MacOS and Linux)

And then:

wget --mirror --no-parent --convert-links
–wait=1 --random-wait
–user-agent=“PersonalArchiveBot/1.0 (contact: your@email.com)”
–accept “.html"
–reject ".css,.js,.png,.jpg,.jpeg,.gif,.woff,.woff2,.ttf,*.svg”
–reject-regex “(^/u/|^/c/|^/tag/|^/search|^/about|^/badges)”

https://forums.forza.net/t/

This stratergy only saves posts, not profiles or anything else, but it does allow you to be able to save and browse the posts. If there’s a post you want to talk about here, copy and paste the contents of the .HTML file into here (Discourse will automatically convert the formatting)
(If you can run it on a MacOS or Linux device, the Windows version of WGet can be unstable for large jobs like this one.)