A good friend of mine wants to retire from owning nissan4wheelers.com due to slow traffic. However, it is such a great resource that I want to take it over to at least keep it on the web and searchable.
Currently, it is hosted and managed by Hoopla. I'm wondering if I would be able to merge a Hoopla site to MyBB. Any advice?
I contacted Hoop.la about it, and they said that the current site owner could get a quote for them to do a data dump. I assume that would give me a copy of the folders and a backup of the database. Would that be enough to do a merge, or would I need to have access to the actual site folders and database?
With a copy of the folders and a copy of the database saved to my server, it wouldn't be a running site, so I am asking if that would be adequate.
I have the option of taking over for him, but I don't know if Hoop.la would allow me to access that stuff. I hope I'm making sense.
(2017-11-10, 08:51 PM)Reserector Wrote: [ -> ]I contacted Hoop.la about it, and they said that the current site owner could get a quote for them to do a data dump. I assume that would give me a copy of the folders and a backup of the database. Would that be enough to do a merge, or would I need to have access to the actual site folders and database?
With a copy of the folders and a copy of the database saved to my server, it wouldn't be a running site, so I am asking if that would be adequate.
I have the option of taking over for him, but I don't know if Hoop.la would allow me to access that stuff. I hope I'm making sense.
I have no clue sorry, because even if you have the database how would you be able to merge with MyBB since MyBB doesn't do hoopla and the database will be different unless someone knows how to convert the whole database.
Maybe MyBB support team can help you further also you've posted this in the wrong section it should be in Merge System Support but no worries a staff member can move it.
I was wondering if I could use one of the other merge options and hope for the best. Maybe I could save most of it? Any thoughts on that?
Here's what Hoop.la said about getting a data dump:
Per the Terms of Service, 30 days' notice is required in order to cancel. Thus, if you do want to cancel today, your effective date will be November 13th.
We can give you a full data dump of your site. It typically costs about $200, but if you're interested, I can get you a quote specifically for your site. The backup format we provide is a combination of a MySQL dump with a separate JSON data file containing activity stream data. We will also provide a tar file containing all attachments and uploads. Note that we do not offer free assistance reverse engineering the database, so you'd need to get a database administrator to assist with interpreting and extracting the data (or you can hire us via Professional Services at $200/hour).
I don't want to risk $200 without some sort of hope that it can be converted and merged without costing a ton of money. It's so frustrating. I really want to save this site, even if it is just a web archive that can be searched and read.
$200 is quite a lot for a data dump with proprietary/unknown structure.
I was in the same boat years ago when I moved to MyBB, except the data dump was given up for free - rapidforum, a free forum host I think was related to rapidshare, terminated its service back then. (Before this termination they also asked a hefty fee for a data dump - it's how pretty much all forum hosts bind their customers). Reverse engineering the structure and writing a custom converter to move it all over to MyBB, it took about a week (~1500 lines of ugly python code). The database structure was an absolute nightmare, fields named string0, string1, string2, filled with mixed charsets that needed a heuristic to handle, etc.
If they hadn't provided a data dump, I'd have written a web scraper to the same effect. If you mainly care about the posts in your forum, and have admin permissions, and those admin permissions include the ability to edit posts others made, and thus viewing the sourcecode (bbcode) rather than the rendered results, web scraping is a very viable option. What you will lose is metadata, passwords, and private messages as usually even admins are not privy to those w/o raw database access.
Although, the hoster might notice you're scraping as it causes a huge number of requests even if you do it slow.
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Never heard of hoop.la before actually, their price list is amazing. Thousands of dollars - per month? For a forum? Seriously? Wow.
He is paying $30 to $40 a month. Not worth that to me. It was once a great site, but now has almost no traffic.
The How To articles and trail ride history are the main things to salvage. I doubt the social interaction threads ever get looked at.
I proposed to my friend that we copy the valuable stuff over to my truck forum so we don't lose web access, and then stand back and watch it burn. Just trying to be practical. I figure that if we do that, Google will find it when people search for the technical info.
I guess I am coming to terms with the fact that forums often have a life cycle. It might be time for this one to pass away.
