TAS Saves Its Forum

Forums NationStates

Regional Podcast - General News

J.D. Classified, with your host, J.D. Drakan gives our embassies a general news update on what is happening in The Allied States.

Episode 18: www.spreaker.com/user/j.d.drakan/j-d-classified-episode-18

THE ALLIED STATES SCRAPES ITS ENTIRE FORUM, SAVING SEVEN YEARS OF HISTORY

The Allied States (TAS) has used the Zetaboards free forum hosting service since its inception in early 2012. However, when Zetaboards owner Brandon Kopetzy announced that all forums under the Zetaboards service would be phased out and replaced with the Tapatalk service, the Allied States largely met the news with apathy. After all, a sizable portion of the regional activity has moved to the Discord servers. As the timeline for the conversion began to loom closer, however, the region realized that the changeover would be downgrade rather than an upgrade, with many features that the forum depends on, such as CSS and Javascript customizability, being made premium features. The Tapatalk conversion has been widely panned by Zetaboards communities, with many forum administrators now seeking alternatives to Zetaboards.

With rumors floating around that the conversion of boards could occur imminently, by the end of July, the forum administrators of TAS decided that the first priority should be to preserve the data on the Allied States forum. With the database safely downloaded, TAS would have the flexibility to find a new hosting service or to self-host a new forum. Unfortunately, the Zetaboards service does not allow admins to download a backup database of their forums.

“We were very concerned that after the transition, the TAS community would be left in an untenable position with no good options,” says CDland, a forum admin. “We would have been forced to either stay on the limited Tapatalk platform, or to restart on a new service from scratch, losing the 350,000 posts accrued over seven years of regional history. A region can be defined as the sum of its members and its history, and we would have lost access to our history had we not been able to download the forums. TAS would have lost a fundamental aspect of its identity. We as a region shared many good and a few bad memories together on our forums. It wouldn’t have felt like TAS without our posting history”.

With possibly only weeks or days to save the forums, the admins were able to utilize a scraper to download all of the posts, topics, and user profiles present on the forums. The scraper was a script designed to crawl through all of the posts on the sprawling TAS forums and save them.“It was a lengthy process,” explains J.D. Drakan. “We had two admins running the scraper in parallel to provide redundancy. Even then, the scraper occasionally errored-out mid-download. Fortunately, we had the requisite technical expertise in our region to develop patches to our scraper to allow it to complete the download successfully. Every second was precious, because scraping will not be possible any longer after the conversion. If we had been delayed, we might not have been able to download the forums.”

The admins have already demonstrated that they are able to re-upload the downloaded database to a phpBB test forum. Now, TAS will have the flexibility to preserve its history and identity while transitioning to a new forum service. Options being discussed in the region include self-hosting a phpBB server and uploading the server to Jcink, a free hosting service that allows users to download the server database for free. We wish our fellow NationStates regions success in preserving their history and look forward to a bright post-Zetaboards future.

Chancellor’s Corner

Hey there! If you’re reading this then, well, congratulations, you made it this far through our update. That’s saying something, cause even I didn’t get that far. Anyways, I’d like to formally extend an invitation to you from The Allied States to come see our region. If you’ve heard of us then our reputation proceeds us, and that reminds me I need to fire my PR team. But if you haven’t had the misf- I mean pleasure of hearing of us, I encourage you to stop by our forums or discord and check us out. I am in the process of organizing our diplomatic corps in conjunction with our Secretary of Foreign Affairs to begin sending ambassadors to discords around Nation States, so feel free to do the same with us! We are a highly active region on discord and will begin to pick back activity up once we finish our forum conversion. I’d love to talk to any interested regions concerning state visits, military ops, or N-Day coordination (our region came in 7th place last time with far fewer nations than most in the top 10). Thank you for reading, and I hope to talk with you soon.
-J.D. Drakan, 23rd Chancellor of The Allied States

Closing Remarks

If you would like to do any of the following, contact your Allied States ambassador who posted this or connect with the Secretary of State on Discord (CDland#9671):

- Connect on discord
- Organise a state visit
- Have cultural exchanges to boost activity
- Organise an inter-regional government meeting
- Develop a treaty

Thank you for reading