grab-site VS replayweb.page

The format you want is WARC. Even the Library of Congress uses it. There are many many WARC scrapers. I'd look at what the Internet Archive recommends. A quick search turned up this from the Archive Team and Jason Scott https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Who_We_Are) but I found that in less than 15 seconds of searching so do your own diligence.

You can use grab-site with --no-offsite-links and --igsets=mediawiki.

Does the forum provide real-time notification for new posts? Like maybe a RSS feed, or a 'New' section? If so, some scripting around grab-site or httrack could grab them quickly.

After a lot of searching for a similar topic, this is a tool I found which works pretty well: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

Crawling is of course the other option. I've seen https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site in the wiki, but I'm unsure how to host the resulting .warc archives.

It's a completely different tool, but I like using grab-site https://github.com/archiveteam/grab-site . Try --wpull-args=--span-hosts='' or something to make it mirror all subdomains. It outputs in WARC format which can be read with a site like https://replayweb.page.

Thusly, as a bit of a statement, here's your "I will do it myself even if I have to bash my head against the wall" collection of the Developer Story on 10-20 top users. I know there are some blogs on old web design, perhaps it might be worth their while as a memento of an era bygone. And as for myself, I am looking into setting up a dedicated server for either grab-site or ArchiveBox. Possibly both!

You can try https://replayweb.page/ as a test for viewing a WARC file. I do think you'll run into problems though with wanting to browse interconnected links in a forum format, but try this as a first step.

One potential option but definitely a bit more work would be, once you have all the warc files downloaded, you can open them all in python using the warctools module and maybe beautifulsoup and potentially parse/extract all of the data embedded in the WARC archives into your own "fresh" HTML webserver.

https://github.com/internetarchive/warctools

Also check out https://archiveweb.page which is open source, local, and lets you export archived data as WARC (ISO 28500). You can embed archives in web pages using their Web Component https://replayweb.page.

Use the Webrecorder tool suite https://webrecorder.net! It uses a new package file format for web archivss called WACZ (Web Archive Zipped) which produces a single file which you can store anywhere and playback offline. It automatically indexes different file formats such as PDFs or media files contained on the website and is versioned. You can record WACZ using the Chrome extension ArchiveWeb.page https://archiveweb.page/ or use the Internet Archive’s Save Page Now button to preserve a website and have the WACZ file sent to you via email: https://inkdroid.org/2023/04/03/spn-wacz/. There are also more sophisticated tools like the in-browser crawler ArchiveWeb.page Express https://express.archiveweb.page or the command-line crawler BrowserTrix https://webrecorder.net/tools#browsertrix-crawler. But manually recording using the Chrome extension is definitely the easiest and most reliable way. To play back the WACZ file just open it in the offline web-app ReplayWeb.page https://replayweb.page.

(Disclaimer: I work at Webrecorder)

Our automated crawler browsertrix-crawler (https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler) uses Puppeteer to run browsers that we archive in by loading pages, running behaviors such as auto-scroll, and then record the request/response traffic. We have some custom behavior for some social media and video sites to make sure that content is appropriate captured. It is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as we have to continue to update these behaviors as sites change, but for the most part it works pretty well.

The trickier part is in replaying the archived websites, as a certain amount of re-writing has to happen in order to make sure the HTML and JS are working with archived assets rather than the live web. One implementation of this is replayweb.page (https://github.com/webrecorder/replayweb.page), which does all of the rewriting client-side in the browser. This sets you interact with archived websites in WARC or WACZ format as if interacting with the original site.

The .tar.gz is a normal mirror, you can open the phpBB3/index.html file in your browser (after unzipping) or tell your web server of choice to serve it as static files. The .warc. you can use https://replayweb.page/ to browse.

Currently the only way I know of doing this is by making a WARC file of the site with something like ArchiveWeb and then opening the WARC file with something like ReplayWeb : https://replayweb.page/

Once archived, the entire site will be made available for anyone to browse on the internet archive. The entire .WARC will also be made available for anyone to download and view locally with a .WARC viewer such as Web Replay. You will be able to download the .WARC file from here.

I know how to work with WARC and WACZ files and can replay them using ReplayWeb by the way! : https://replayweb.page/ I know ReplayWeb lets me search the contents of WARC and WACZ files by keywords...

Of course, the next question will be: Once / if I find the right file with the correct URL, how do I actually access that content? I assume it will involve searching through the massive WARC files using a dedicated software. I tried using replayweb.page, but many of the files seemed to be inaccessible.