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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.
> I'm just not sure what the intermediate steps would be to get something usable like a vBulletin…
Once you have a crawl, you'll likely want to convert that unstructured data to structured data. For example, if I look at https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/portal.php, the thread title and hierarchy is in
, posts are in, etc. I see an old project (https://github.com/IanLondon/detectorist-scraper) that did this and may be a useful place to start, and I imagine there are others.Once you have the structured data, You can decide whether to use it to build a static site, to import it into another forum, etc.
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
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
> This is a gem to help extract data from vBulletin Forums, specifically those which you have no control over.
https://github.com/lloydpick/vbulletin
This is a very old tool, it’s hard to say if it will work; then again, seems very relevant too so worst case it could provide an inspiration.
You can try forum-dl, a forum scraping tool I've been writing for this purpose: https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl
It's single-threaded, alpha-quality software, and still isn't compatible with many forums and themes. But it can export WARCs and may just happen to work for you.
I guess your best chance is to use something like https://archivebox.io/.