Celebrim
Legend
A nerd forum I once upon a time was highly active on upgraded its forums recently (by which I mean, a few years ago, because it has been a while since I was active) and in the process dropped a lot of its historical threads, particularly those of the period I was active. As a result, poof, a lot of things I once wrote no longer exist even in the wayback machines, and that got me to thinking.
It occurs to me that I have no real assurance that six or sixteen years down the line the same thing would happen to me at EnWorld, as you never know what the future might bring.
Therefore, a feature I'd really like would be the ability to dump all my posts into a text file. Another forum that I'm active on and where I wrote some stuff I'm proud of has this and it provides a lot of peace of mind.
This is a feature I'd actually pay for if it was behind a paywall.
I could write a custom webcrawler that would slurp it out myself, but not only is that too much like my real work, but also it's the sort of thing which if you run it against a forum is a bit rude because of the potential server hit (especially if I'm not careful to sleep the threads often enough) so it wouldn't be my first choice.
Anyway, not something I'm expecting a big reaction to, but something to think about.
It occurs to me that I have no real assurance that six or sixteen years down the line the same thing would happen to me at EnWorld, as you never know what the future might bring.
Therefore, a feature I'd really like would be the ability to dump all my posts into a text file. Another forum that I'm active on and where I wrote some stuff I'm proud of has this and it provides a lot of peace of mind.
This is a feature I'd actually pay for if it was behind a paywall.
I could write a custom webcrawler that would slurp it out myself, but not only is that too much like my real work, but also it's the sort of thing which if you run it against a forum is a bit rude because of the potential server hit (especially if I'm not careful to sleep the threads often enough) so it wouldn't be my first choice.
Anyway, not something I'm expecting a big reaction to, but something to think about.
