Download forum data

[shane2]

Please give us a feature for us administrators to download our forum data to save and archive for ourselves. To save the entire board and all posts and threads within it in one quick easy download.

[Ryan Roos]

We will not be implementing a full forum download feature at this time.

However, you can download your own personal data by going to your Global Settings page. Click the little gear icon in the bottom right hand corner to get there. The option is in the section called Export Member Data.

Thank you.

[shane2]

Well that's useless, no offense. My personal data is meaningless without all the rest. Please reconsider this decision. I want to backup and archive my full forum as it appears on the server in my own private personal archive on external hard drives for safe keeping and long term reference. I may want to take my forums offline. Please consider this in the future.

[Ryan Roos]

No offense taken.

You have a right to your own content. You don't have a right to everyone else's. It's really that simple.

Your forum is backed up by ProBoards on a regular basis. 3rd party programs that pull data from your forum are against the TOS and will get your forum deleted (usually before you ever get even a portion of your forum downloaded). We can't stop you from manually copy and pasting, but we aren't going to expedite that process.

I don't quite understand what you mean when you say you 'may want to take my forums offline' but I think that if you look at it from a business standpoint you can understand that it doesn't help us to allow people to just pick up and go at a moments notice.

Lastly, we are extremely busy preparing for the launch of the new v5 software and a feature like this is not a priority.

It's entirely possible that in the future there may be a way to do what you're requesting. I know that we someday want to have a way for people to migrate their forums from elsewhere onto ProBoards. It's possible that at that time we won't just add an import, but possibly an export too. But that still won't be for quite a while.

Thank you.

[RedBassett]

In addition to what Ryan Roos has said, if by "take the forum offline" you mean hide it from public view, you can always switch on maintenance mode whoch will shut out everyone except staff.