Ambrosia Software Web Board: The Fate of Ambrosia and the Cythera Forums - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I actually worked a little on this project yesterday for the first time in months, so maybe I'll actually finish this someday.

I still haven't had the chance to look into alternative locations, but I will do so before school starts.

I hate Cythera. This project is pointless. No one cares about what they wrote 10 years ago. No one wants to be reminded of what they wrote 10 years ago. We should just immigrate to some forum that's relevant to today. Like a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan-forum. Or maybe the gun-activisit forum that Shorty frequents (okay, so maybe that is a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan-forum, I'm not entirely sure); I think that one has TSes, anyway.

Did someone hack your account? o_o

Whoever it was, 'emigrate' is the proper word, not immigrate.

Oh whatever. I thought you emigrated from somewhere and immigrated to somewhere. bah.

I'm still working on backing up some of the forum's threads. I thought I had all the Chronicles, but I noticed one on Slayer's Guide that I don't have. It's called War of Corruption by J.Ace21. It was apparently submitted & released on October 24, 2000. Here is the Chron-announcement thread. But I can't find it on the Chronicles board. Am I overlooking it somehow? Did it get deleted? How can I add this chronicle to my collection? I gotta catch 'em all!

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 14 October 2013 - 01:23 PM

I can't find it either, and it's not in the Wayback Machine as far as I can tell. I did fix some broken links on an unrelated Rogan story though.

(Before you ask, it looks like the old forum's deleted posts were not saved and imported, they were just deleted.)

Whoa, I didn't even attempt to find the link (shows how much attention I pay when I'm copying the stories). I am totally in awe of that pub image! Very impressive. Now I want to make fake Cythera images...

How can you use the Wayback Machine on Ambrosia? When I tried, I was told it wasn't allowed?

Edit: Oops, forgot to say the most important part: Thank you for attempting to find The Lost Chronicle, and for fixing the link in Rogan's chronicle!

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 17 October 2013 - 09:56 AM

I'm not (quite) dead yet, but, unfortunately, I haven't had much time to look into this project, although this looks potentially promising.

Hi everyone, I'm BreadWorldMercy's brother. Totally forgot I had this account, sure I haven't used it in at least ten years. Anyway, I was talking to my sister on the phone the other day and she mentioned her efforts to save all the stories in the chronicles. Seeing as how in the forum there are 8 pages of 30 threads each my math says there are at least 240 stories there. That seems like a long time to spend copying and pasting text from each. I thought that this might be a good use for Wget. I've played around with it a little bit and ran into a couple of challenges. Mainly how best to recursively download off the forums. I'm still playing with the different Wget options (Actually I'm using a Windows port), given the way the robots exclusion protocol is being used by Ambrosia (Disallow: /forums) I'm almost sure makes a robots=off necessary. I'm trying to come up with ways to find the URLs of different threads. One way I was playing around with last night was to copy the source of the Cythera Chronicles front page and extract urls from it with FINDSTR that matched the pattern that a thread would look like (e.g. index.php?showtopic=xxxxxx). Couple of problems with that. First of all the extracted strings were the whole lines so there was a lot of extraneous characters before and after the URL. I could probably use something like Notepad++ to replace everything else in the line and then have a list of URLs I can plug into Wget with. However that leads to my next problem. With the chronicles I'd have to do that about 8 times. Not too much effort really. The problem is that it would scale a lot if I wanted to do the same thing with the regular Cythera Web Boards. That would require a lot more of copying and pasting sources. I'd like to find a way to automate the tedious processes in this. I also am not sure this method would work for threads with multiple pages.

After encountering the puzzles above I thought I would ask the regulars here if they knew any tricks to navigate the forum. Specifically are there ways make a given web board list every thread on a single page (The most I found was about 30 or 40) and/or make a thread list every reply on a single page?

I'm also of course open to other tactics or solutions to the problem. Perhaps I am simply looking at it from the wrong angle. I can see how the least technical solution would be to simply C&P the text from every thread but I'm looking for something that would automate as much of the process as possible.

I apologize if anyone else has already found a suitable solution and this is all a moot point. I just wanted to do something to help and it seemed like a interesting puzzle.

Wow, I'm surprised to see you here! I have no idea what you're talking about with that technical stuff. I have finished copying the Chronicles board to my computer (at least, I think I have. I have 215 documents in my Chron folder), but I only have some of the regular Cythera board (mainly the stories). I've pretty-much given up on saving more threads at this point, and am just working on formatting the stories I have so that they can be saved in Rich Text Format instead of Rich Text w/ Attachments. If there is some way to make a computer program copy everything for us, that would be really exciting. It makes me sad to think of all the game-info that will be lost when this forum disappears. I don't know how I can help though. Should I copy the URL of every page of the Cythera board? (It's like 56 pages, that doesn't seem like too much trouble.) I don't know of any way to display every thread on one page, or every post of a thread on one page. As far as I know, you can have at max 40 posts on a page. On a previous version of the forum, there was a lo-fi option that would display 50 posts/page, but that's gone now :(

Here's a 15-minute attempt at the start of a web-crawler: https://github.com/sfiera/arachne

% ./arachne.py
Page 0:
    6077
    6648
    88485
    116340
    127849
    ...
Page 1:
    106179
    116397
    117276
    125096
    125121
    ...
Page 2:
    ...

Prints out topic IDs by page. e.g. http://www.ambrosias...?showtopic=6077 is the oldest topic on the first page.

Pallas Athene, on 24 October 2013 - 09:25 AM, said:

Thanks for the help. I had thought about doing something similar but its been years since I wrote any real code and I have very limited experience in python. My initial thought was to comment out the page number outputs, add the rest of the url to be printed along with the thread number, have that printed to a text file, and finally have wget read that file as input. I see a couple of problems with that however. First it will only get the first page of a thread that has multiple pages. That could be worked around by adding additional parsing in the python code. I can take a look at that over the weekend. I'm unfamiliar with the python libraries so I'll have brush up on urllib and bs4 so that I have some idea what I'm doing. The second issue is perhaps more troubling. As these threads are simply identified by numbers it will make it difficult to find a thread dealing with a particular topic or issue in the future. I suppose one could use something like grep to search through the files for keywords or phrases but that seems like that might be difficult for the less technical savvy. Perhaps adding another crawl to retrieve all the index pages would help to identify topic titles to thread numbers would be helpful. I am concerned that with the method I described above the URLs would still be pointing to the actual forum rather than the local copy. If I were recursively downloading everything using wget's crawler there is an option to change the links but I don't think it will do that if I'm just giving it a list. I suppose I could write my own code to go through the source and change it after download. Perhaps that is the best option given the path I'm working down. Another option would be to keep playing with wget's recursive options until I find a good way to filter what I do and don't want downloaded. A fascinating puzzle.

BMW, have you pulled down the character info thread yet? That's something that we probably shouldn't overlook, and may need sooner rather than later.

I'm up to five stories now: Sorcery Tower, Echoes, Shadow Games, Witch Hunt, and Ruffian Encampment. I'll try to finish the rest in this post when I can. I couldn't bring myself to keep reading the LKH story again though, it's just a mess. :/

Apparently Ruffian Encampment was about beating up a bunch of ruffians in every single post. Oh, and I had no idea kickme was in the stories. The post count was much smaller than the others I've grabbed, but it was surprisingly close in word count size to the average story. (I'll have a stats post with some "fun" trivia ready once I've grabbed all the stories.)

Oh, the days when Selax would post a bunch of text every day.

Avatara, on 04 November 2013 - 03:33 AM, said:

I meant to add that I'd like a pulled-down text copy of the character info thread (and I can do a quick scan for links and pictures as well) because I'll need that for the eventual wiki. Except with 100+ characters, my story method may not work as well. Especially since many of those characters predate the stories I'm putting on the wiki, or were never/rarely used. But 106 isn't as bad as I thought.

(Yes, I'm too wary of editing posts right now, it wasn't working right earlier.)

I guess I shouldn't have worried, since i forgot it auto-combines text posted in short succession.

Johnny- I don't know if you've had any luck with your programming mumbo-jumbo, but if there's any grunt work (not involving programming) that I can do to help, let me know. I'd be happy to copy the URL for every page of the forum or note every thread more than 1 page, etc.

Tyry- Are you implying that you'd be too wary to move posts from the character info topic to the character info archive? You used to do this from time to time & it seemed a good system. Of course, then I'd need to re-backup both threads, but whatever.

Yes, I do have the Character Info thread, as well as some random OoC threads that looked useful. Of course, not all of them. In fact, I may delete most of the ones I saved, eventually, because I doubt anyone cares.

Tyry, is it okay for me to e-mail you my folder of saved threads? It's monstrously huge. The .zip is 41mbs and the unzipped folder is nearing 300mbs. I would still like to reformat some more threads and maybe delete some entirely in order to make the folder smaller, but I'm not motivated to work on it anymore because I don't know what I'm doing. I think it might be good for you to see which threads I have and which ones I don't, but I'll understand if you don't want to download the whole big file.

Kat mentioned on the OoR OoC that maybe we should organize a mailing list. I just assumed we'd have to keep in touch over #cythera if the forum disappears before we make ourselves a new forum elsewhere. But I think a mailing list would probably work better. How do we go about setting one up?

Zip it up and put it on your dropbox public folder (you have that, don't you?). 41MB is a bit large for email.

I totally forgot about the archive. That means I'll have to find it and look up even more characters. I knew 100 was kinda low...

BreadWorldMercy453, on 04 November 2013 - 09:28 AM, said:

We already have an emergency backup here.

Fiery- Good idea! ^_^

Tyry- I've been working on shrinking my folder today & have made a little progress. The .zip is still 34mgs though. I can't remember how to use Dropbox, does this link work?: https://dl.dropboxus...y%20archive.zip
(Note, if you can get the folder: The character info and similar threads are filed under OoC > Useful Reference. The "Useful Info" folder isn't story-related stuff (it's gameplay or hacking threads)... I should probably have re-named those to make more sense.)

Edit: Another note: I use TextEdit 1.6 for this. I don't know how these documents will look in other programs... Especially the "rich text with attachments" documents (which is what most of the OoC threads & some of the other threads are). I hope you can read them :\

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 04 November 2013 - 06:56 PM

The link worked just fine. You even "helpfully" highlighted all the stories I abandoned in red to remind me they existed.

There's a bunch of topics in there that I totally forgot existed. And yet I'm pretty sure I was responsible for them. Like that one where Harlequin joined at the end of a story and started an ooc pile-on in the middle of trying to wrap everything up. Forgot I split that.

You even got a bunch of pictures too, wow. You could just leave that link up permanently as the forum archive.

Ah, I didn't realize the red highlights would transfer over, but those were stories that I thought would be fairly likely to be updated before the forums disappear. I highlighted them to remind myself to check for updates later. (I guess I should have highlighted Choose Your Own Adventure, since I myself posted in it since originally archiving it)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of images and artwork were broken by the time I started "archiving." In fact, some of the images in my artwork folder were ones Kat had backed up ages ago, & sent me. Some images are still in their thread files - the prime example being the Glass Menagerie (I'm pretty sure I just left all the images in that "rich text with attachments" file). That file itself is 5.3 megabytes :x

I'm a little sad about the disappearance of a lot of the old images. Here's a list of other things about my archive that I'm slightly sad about:
-Some stories that didn't get very far (such as the Once Again sequel) were deleted & lost
-J.Ace21's chronicle is gone
-The endings of the longer chronicles were cut. Thankfully Sely reposted these (thanks Sely!), though the formatting (such as italics, etc.) was lost in the copy-pasting.
-Sely reposted the two completed TSes that were lost (again, thanks Sely!), but we don't have the dates for those posts.
-The Tale of the Treasure exceeded the post limit & was completed in a second thread. Later, after deleting the OoC posts, Tyry reposted the ending posts into the original thread (thanks, Tyry!). However, for these last several posts, he didn't specify the original posters or post dates. The second thread is now gone (interestingly enough, the "prologue" thread where Desert Fox invented the premise for the story was never deleted).

These things are all really minor, I know. Just a bit irksome that I'm making an effort to make my story archive as complete as possible, and in a few areas it's out of my control. I'm glad that so much of this board's history has survived until now ^_^

I can't give you the times on TotT, but I can guess at the original posters.

Post #182 looks like DF.
#183 looks like whoever owns Comanus (don't have time to look right now!).
#184 sounds like me.
#185 sounds like...me?
#186 looks like theKestrel? Or maybe Talos.
#187 looks like DF.
#188 looks like me.

I'm fairly confident in 182, 184, 187, and 188. Not so much on the others without re-reading most of the story.

Thanks, Tyry ^_^ IIRC, when I read that TS (a year ago? Two years ago?) I could guess most of the posters, but just glancing at it, it's hard to tell. Unless you see "Kestrel" spelled with an 'a', in which case you know it's DF. If you or anyone decides to do "Meaningless Statistics" on TSes that far back, it might be inconvenient.

This is off-topic, but when I was going through the board history, it became blatantly obvious why Sely was chosen to be a moderator (when he was first appointed, I thought it was just to torment me). He pretty much made himself moderator a couple of years before it was official!

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 12 November 2013 - 03:50 PM

Here's my archive of everything that was on the boards as of a week or two ago:
Cythera Web Boards

"Once again"
"Tavern Continued"
An "is everyone gone?" thread from 2002
Grapper's Return

Links between forum and topic pages should work.

This post has been edited by Pallas Athene: 07 November 2013 - 05:15 PM

That only reminded me of why it's bad to look at old topics. Why are we making an archive again?