Tarshana Posted August 2, 2016 Author Share Posted August 2, 2016 So I've messaged anyone I could find on the project website to let them know that Bioware is shutting down their forums and the BSN Projects might be lost as well. While most of the modders are still around and have their mods on Nexus already, there's a small handful that are not. I've gone through 544 pages on the project site since last night. While someone might be thinking I'm jumping the gun.. I am. It could very well be that the projects won't be affected but I'd rather be safe than sorry and use a few hours during my vacation week to preserve something worth preserving than waiting until the last moment. (Like the Ant and the Grasshopper). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CreeperLava Posted August 2, 2016 Share Posted August 2, 2016 Thank you Tarshana ! I've messaged JeanLuc and smarteck, since their mods are pretty much only on the BSN forums, so condemned for sure. They are still active, hopefully they'll switch to the Nexus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
me3deager Posted August 2, 2016 Share Posted August 2, 2016 Thank you Tarshana ! I've messaged JeanLuc and smarteck, since their mods are pretty much only on the BSN forums, so condemned for sure. They are still active, hopefully they'll switch to the Nexus.Yeah, I think smarteck and JeanLuc's work are maybe the most important to not lose. For crying out loud, didn' smarteck win some award for best graphics mod of 2012 with PCGamer? I know I use a lot of his graphics myself. I have my copies, but I still see new players coming to the series all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tarshana Posted August 2, 2016 Author Share Posted August 2, 2016 Thank you Tarshana ! I've messaged JeanLuc and smarteck, since their mods are pretty much only on the BSN forums, so condemned for sure. They are still active, hopefully they'll switch to the Nexus. Oh that's right! They have some amazing visuals I've used. Thank you for doing that! I'll have to snag another copy of their work just in case. (My SSD blew out last year and I lost a lot of stuff so I'm super finicky about keeping backups now). And yes, smarteck did win an award for his work. In fact, that magazine article is what led me to finding the Thane Mod, the ME3 better ending mod and a few others. It eventually landed me on Nexus and without Nexus and all the contributors I would have been lost years ago. I started modding and reading about modding while I was in chemo; it was the one thing that took my mind off the pain and nausea and it's made me really passionate about preserving these mods. One set of mods I'll be forever sad to have lost were the PeggySue hair mods I used a long time ago. This is probably one of the last posts I'll make about this issue. Right now it's about getting the info out here and reconnecting with modders and seeing what happens. I'm shelving my work with the wiki toolset info and saved mods until the 26th. My hope is that my work is in vain and that BW will grant themselves one last fan-based hurrah before going the wayside. Thanks again for helping folks, it really means a lot. And seriously, thank you x1000000000000000 to the Nexus creators, owners, admins and everyone in between. This place makes me feel a lot less alone in the world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadesofnight Posted August 3, 2016 Share Posted August 3, 2016 Okay! After digging around for a 7 year old password... finding it... then resetting it anyway, I'm here! XD I see some familiar avatars from the BSN boards, does anyone else think this might be an ideal place for those of us archiving/backing up/saving the BSN content to create a temporary base of operations once the BSN forums go read-only? If that's okay with the people here that is. I know people in the NWN community have been working on backing up the NWN1 and 2 forums. Tarshana has mentioned working on the wiki and Projects. CreeperLava and I are both doing HTTracks of the forums. Numerous people have mentioned creating scrapers for the forum content. Fexelea last mentioned something about the Mass Effect section. And I think it was in the NWN section that someone was talking about using wget to do the same thing as HTTrack. I also sent an email to the Wayback Machine asking if they could direct their crawler to just grab the whole Bioware forums instead of having to grab the pages individually, but so far I've only got a standard 'you can save pages by visiting our main page' response directing me to the thing that lets you save one page at a time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CreeperLava Posted August 3, 2016 Share Posted August 3, 2016 (edited) I've made backups of smarteck's and JeanLuc's work, should include everything they made. smarteck partially switched to Nexus, but I didn't get any answer from him yet. JeanLuc answered this morning on Steam, and is looking into uploading everything to Nexus. He apparently still has backups of his own, so that's good (since a few of his uploads were unavailable because of gamefront crash). Edited August 3, 2016 by CreeperLava Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moho25 Posted August 3, 2016 Share Posted August 3, 2016 (edited) I've made backups of smarteck's and JeanLuc's work, should include everything they made. smarteck partially switched to Nexus, but I didn't get any answer from him yet. JeanLuc answered this morning on Steam, and is looking into uploading everything to Nexus. He apparently still has backups of his own, so that's good (since a few of his uploads were unavailable because of gamefront crash). This is great, thanks Creeper! FYI, the Cinema Mods are also forum-hosted. And, Jean-Luc has at east two threads that I know of. --- Also, yes, I'd suggest this thread or the one on the ME3Explorer to coordinate preservation efforts. Obviously we don't want to use the BW forums. I'm also always on the ThaneMOD forum, of course, if folks need me. We have a 24 hour post hold, but if you register and use your same handle, I'll get you approved asap. Edited August 3, 2016 by moho25 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tarshana Posted August 3, 2016 Author Share Posted August 3, 2016 A heads up: I was able to use HTtrack and a lot of configuration to save the entire Legacy website. It took some reading and trial and error but I figured it out. I configured it to download in English but I can translate several languages- There are Polish pages there so that won't be a problem. I can also translate Finnish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese, Irish and Spanish. I'm still learning Portuguese but I think that can be managed and one of my close friends is Chinese and can xlate into Mandarin and Simplified. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moho25 Posted August 3, 2016 Share Posted August 3, 2016 A heads up: I was able to use HTtrack and a lot of configuration to save the entire Legacy website. It took some reading and trial and error but I figured it out. I configured it to download in English but I can translate several languages- There are Polish pages there so that won't be a problem. I can also translate Finnish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese, Irish and Spanish. I'm still learning Portuguese but I think that can be managed and one of my close friends is Chinese and can xlate into Mandarin and Simplified. This is fantastic. How big is that file? Yikes. So I've messaged anyone I could find on the project website to let them know that Bioware is shutting down their forums and the BSN Projects might be lost as well. While most of the modders are still around and have their mods on Nexus already, there's a small handful that are not. I've gone through 544 pages on the project site since last night. While someone might be thinking I'm jumping the gun.. I am. It could very well be that the projects won't be affected but I'd rather be safe than sorry and use a few hours during my vacation week to preserve something worth preserving than waiting until the last moment. (Like the Ant and the Grasshopper). You probably know this, but FYI, the dropdown menus are very wonky. 544 pages translates to 5440 mods, which means there's 3000 more (I had already added up there were at least 8340). Are you actually downloading all these? >.> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tarshana Posted August 3, 2016 Author Share Posted August 3, 2016 Yes, Yes I am downloading every single piece of data. It's a few hundred gigs, but I made room. Some of the files are redundant because they are hosted on Nexus, or private blogs, already. I was able to set HTTrack to capture the URL bypassing the language select issue that was present. When it captured, it also captured my log in. I then hid the projects that weren't needed. Some of the blogs I can't save because they are private and there's diddly I can do about that. I can't add any friends or send messages. I just want to say that the Universe is pretty awesome in that I was forced to take my holiday week this week instead of next. I had to go into work early this morning to cover lunches but otherwise I can keep hammering away at all this :) Right now it's getting late for me (I think I'm on a different time zone than most people) but I've made some coffee and I can take a cat nap and keep working while most people are awake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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