Forums such as vBulletin

Anonymous Tester
03/29/2006 07:02 am
I was testing your product to backup our vBulletin forum attachments. Unfortunately, the only way Ive found to get it to work is to view each page of each forum and manually pull the links to the left pane, and then set a template that says to filter filename by attachment.php. This way is almost as tedious as doing it manually, especially since I still must go back and rename files. A couple quick questions...first , will future versions be made to deal with this issue? I would assume you could look at urls with attachment.php?blahblah and then pull the filename from whatever is between the href tags. Secondly, how about a key that we can select all links in page and then drag to left and they start each url as separate project (instead of all urls in same project). Secondly, we sometimes have listings of files pasted that need to be downloaded - is there any future plans to take text in http://blah.com/filename.ext format and download them as if they were links?
Oleg Chernavin
03/29/2006 07:02 am
Thank you for asking. First, can you please tell me the site and what you would like to download. I may have a good advise on how to automate it.

Second, it is possible to make a list of URLs - one per line, copy them all to clipboard and then click Paste button in Offline Explorer to add it as a Project. All these URLs will be loaded when you click Download.

Best regards,
Oleg Chernavin
MetaProducts corp.
Anonymous Tester
03/29/2006 07:02 am
First, let me say I am really impressed with how your software has progressed - had http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/2865/oe.htm bookmarked so that tells you how long it`s been ;). Now that I have that out of the way, let me clarify my complaints/suggestions. My problem with the forum is it will not work several layers deep. I must create a project with each thread - it will download that page and then get the attachment, but no `nesting` works. That would be fine, if I could grab all links and then create project for each thread all at once. The problem is currently all dragged links go into 1 project and for some reason that doesnt work for me. Perhaps I am missing a feature? It would be nice if ctrl+drag puts each link in it`s own project. Secondly, the way most of the forums work, the file desired might actually be served through ssi script (in this case php). For some reason, when using offline explorer, it doesnt pick up on the extension and also it names the download attachment.php@blah instead of the correct filename (as normal browsers do). These problems occur on all vBulletin sites. Ours are private but say I was trying to download all txt files (from http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/showthread.php?threadid=3113, etc) - the problem I have is that I cannot just give it a forum at once (ie http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/forumdisplay.php?f=3) and let it work recursively through it. Perhaps it is possible, but it wasnt working for me. I had to create a project per page. Lastly, about the plain text file. I actually meant is there anyway you could add an option to follow text links - ie in the html file say there is http://blah but it doesnt have a href tag, can you follow it anyway. I hope this explains everything. Thanks in advance and keep up the nice work!
Oleg Chernavin
03/29/2006 07:02 am
I just went to the site. It is easy to load threads. For example, I entered the URL of the Announcements section:

http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/forumdisplay.php?s=629a2b3031efe6d1b0676db8b5360dbc&f=2

I supplied Level=1 and Offline Explorer got all threads there. If you want to load only the section threads, you can simply use URL Filters | Filename | Custom configuration and add showthread keyword there. This will restrict the download.

Oleg.
Anonymous Tester
03/29/2006 07:02 am
That page is a bad example because there are no attachments in any of those threads. Again, I have no problem pulling just the pages, I just cannot get attachments. Try pulling all the zip files from within the threads contained at http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/forumdisplay.php?f=9. I cannot get it to do it all at once. I try by setting filename filter for http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/showthread.php and http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/attachment.php, but it never pulls the attachments just the showthread.
Oleg Chernavin
03/29/2006 07:02 am
Attachments can be easily loaded. I used the following as starting URL:

http://www.vbulletintemplates.com/mods/forumdisplay.php?f=9

I set Level to 2, URL Filters | Filename - selected "Custom configuration" and added two keywords to the Included keywords list:

showthread
attachment

It loaded the files. However the attachment page only contained a warning that I have to logon. I haven`t registered there, so I don`t know how the attachment page should really look.

Oleg.
Anonymous Tester
03/29/2006 07:02 am
Thanks for the tip - just putting attachment and showthread worked. I was using the entire url and not just those small keywords - after changing it worked fine. Now, it still did the same thing where it would save the file as attachment.php?postid=1234 instead of as filename.zip! I guess I should just write a quick .bat file to rename them to whatever extension - the only time this doesnt work is in forums where files might have several different extensions (one pdf, one txt, etc). Thanks again and great product!
Oleg Chernavin
03/29/2006 07:02 am
If it is a real .zip file, you can try to export the site. Export code will try to recognize atual file type and add the corresponding extension if you check "Use standard extensions" there.

Oleg.