WotC Forums Migration Tool

You most probably know by now that WotC is closing its D&D, M:tG and other community forums on October 29th. Already, hundreds of WotC forum members have begun migrating over here to EN World, and as part of that process they are transferring content that would otherwise be lost. The content is being placed in the Emergency WotC Evacuation Lifeboat forum, the Character Builds & Optimizations forum, and the D&D Adventurer's League forum. The Emergency WotC Evacuation Lifeboat Forum is a general storage area for any and all transferred content, regardless of its nature, until we get chance to sort through and move it all to where it needs to be. EN World and WotC member MerricB has spent over 12 hours coding a tool which makes it incredibly easy and quick to transfer your content from WotC's forums to here. It preserves formatting, and copies entire threads, making transferring your content take a matter of seconds rather than hours.


[h=4]Original Post[/h]
This tool isn't complete yet, but it should get most of the formatting from a series of posts on a page on the Wizards forums, convert it to BB Code, which you can copy and post on EN World.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?res...00&authkey=!ABKffCWJONMiKjI&ithint=folder,zip

It's a Windows program, written in C# on my Windows 10 machine - I have no idea if it'll work on previous versions of Windows. I know it won't work on Macs. Let me know if it works for you.

The program is pretty simple:
* put the URL of the page you wish to convert in the text box at the top of the page.
* press "Convert"
* Wait patiently for the page to load on the left-hand pane, and then for the BBCode to appear in the right-hand pane.
* Press "Copy" to copy the text to your clipboard.

At that point, you can do anything you like with it.

The left-hand pane is a simple browser, so you could navigate using that; it'll convert a Wizards forum page automatically when you get to the next. If you spot any types of formatting it is not bringing over, let me know. (It removes any orders to turn the text white or black, and it doesn't understand certain types of colour codes at the moment.)

The browser doesn't quite understand the Wizards log-in system on my computer. It might on yours.

A row of post numbers will appear down the bottom of the page as well.
* Press on a number to just cause that post to appear on the right-hand side; it also copies itself to your clipboard, ready for re-posting.


Cheers!

 

[Nibelung]

I would like to thank you very much for this tool. It makes moving topics so easy that it is now basically a matter of picking and choosing instead of thinking what will give out more work to make the damn tags work.

I'm even considering de-editing the trasncription of the Ardent/Artificer/Bard guides I was working since the weekend just to keep the original formatting.

 

[MerricB]

Thanks, everyone! I'm glad you're finding it useful.

(Makes quite a change from the past month , which hasn't been fun to live through).

Alas, I'll have to pass on any beers.

Cheers!

 

[Nylanfs]

So straight vodka then?

 

[TheBigHouse]

I had some problems getting my google docs formatting to appear on correctly on the forums. I would either have to lose all my bold and italics or lose all my colors, depending on how i pasted it. I found the following workaround that might be helpful for some people.

1. Download the google doc as a DOCX.
2. Paste the following code into a new word doc and save it as a .bas file (example wtbb.bas)

[sblock]

'Word2BBCode-Converter v0.1

Sub Word2BBCode()

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

ConvertItalic
ConvertBold

ActiveDocument.Content.Copy

Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub
Private Sub ConvertBold()
ActiveDocument.Select

With Selection.Find

.ClearFormatting
.Font.Bold = True
.Text = ""

.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False

.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue

Do While .Execute
With Selection
If InStr(1, .Text, vbCr) Then
' Just process the chunk before any newline characters
' We'll pick–up the rest with the next search
.Font.Bold = False
.Collapse
.MoveEndUntil vbCr
End If

' Don't bother to markup newline characters (prevents a loop, as well)
If Not .Text = vbCr Then
.InsertBefore ""
.InsertAfter ""
End If

.Font.Bold = False
End With
Loop
End With
End Sub
Private Sub ConvertItalic()
ActiveDocument.Select

With Selection.Find

.ClearFormatting
.Font.Italic = True
.Text = ""

.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False

.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue

Do While .Execute
With Selection
If InStr(1, .Text, vbCr) Then
' Just process the chunk before any newline characters
' We'll pick-up the rest with the next search
.Font.Italic = False
.Collapse
.MoveEndUntil vbCr
End If

' Don't bother to markup newline characters (prevents a loop, as well)
If Not .Text = vbCr Then
.InsertBefore ""
.InsertAfter ""
End If

.Font.Italic = False
End With
Loop
End With
End Sub

[/sblock]



3. open your DOCX in word.
4. Press Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor.
5. click import file and import your .bas file.
6. Click run macro
7. copy and paste your new marked up document back into google docs. (for some reason copying straight from word causes the colors to disappear)
8. copy your new google doc on to the board.

this only converts bold and italics not underlines, images, or hyperlinks, fyi.

 

[MerricB]

G'day, all!

I've just made a minor update to the program to handle the (third) way the Wizards forums handle colour, as well as fixing the way it handles black text (compared to #000000 text).

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

I've made a couple more modifications to the program. The major one is to allow it to create export code for the athas.org site (for saving a bunch of Dark Sun stuff). It might fix a couple of other small errors as well. Or not.

If you see any strange formatting glitches, please let me know and I'll try to fix them!

Cheers,
Merric

 

[MerricB]

Just added support for tables (EN World and Athas.org)

Cheers!

 

[RealAlHazred]

Without this tool, sir, I guarantee you there is a heck of a lot of content that would have been Lost to the Ages. At the very least, I feel I have to thank you for the ability [MENTION=37579]Jester Canuck[/MENTION] had to save some of Wrecan's posts from oblivion.

 

[Ricochet]

This tool works beautifully. I just converted a stack of threads with it. Great work, Merric!

 

[RSIxidor]

Hey, thanks for this! Realizing I have 6 days before the old forums go away I was starting to panic.

Now we'll see how long I procrastinate before actually posting the guide over here...