BSN is shutting down; files there could be lost.

[CreeperLava]

Thank you ! It would be best if we could upload our findings through torrent, this is a community work, and torrents are ideal for that. I have enough room on my HDDs to make a secondary backup, Tarshana.

 

Also, I agree with giftfish (edit : moho25 :P), we should keep the discussion to a single thread (this one sounds good to me), not 3 different websites^^.

Edited August 3, 2016 by CreeperLava

[moho25]

@Tarshana --

 

I'm not sure how this can be accurate:

 

While most of the modders are still around and have their mods on Nexus already, there's a small handful that are not.

 

We already know there are 8340 mods hosted on BSN (possibly more). These are isolated to DAO, DA2, and the ME trilogy.

 

Adding up all of Nexuses mods for these five games only amounts to 3826 mods. I also know that's an overestimate, as it counts all of CDAMJCs individual TPFs (he put up separate pages for all of them), and it includes lots of new mods not on BSN, which has been in read-only state for about 2 years now.

 

This means the bulk of mods on BSN -- probably 2/3s if not 3/4 -- are not yet on Nexus.

 

Btw, when you download the "entire site", does that include all the mods that are hosted on the site?

[moho25]

Yes, Yes I am downloading every single piece of data. It's a few hundred gigs, but I made room.

 

Yaaay.

 

FYI, we just cross-posted a bit :)

[Tarshana]

I'll keep everything here form now on :)

 

I went through every one of the project mods I could find on the BSN website and then with Nexus mods and ModDB open I did a search. Then I went to google, tumbler and wordpress because those sites host a lot of mods. Anything not found on any of those I marked "contact." I sent out emails, private messages, etc. Then I marked people "contacted" and then I have ticked off some people with "responded." I should have stated that I meant a handful of modders, not mods themselves, aren't hosted somewhere other than BSN. I was labeling the mods per author rather than per file. If I were to hazard a guess at raw files not hosted somewhere else, I'd put that number at 2k between DA, ME and NWN. I did notice, however, that all the NWN mods I saw are up on Nexus. I will have to probably go through them again, it was getting late when I was going through them before.

Since we will have the database at our fingertips.. and CreeperLava, you will have to explain to me this torrent thing;I can read directions but I'm basically a noob, we can sift through the mods with more eyes than my own.

[moho25]

Wait, so there's NWN mods on BSN, too? Not sure I remembered that.

[Tarshana]

Yes there are. http://social.bioware.com/project/8992/ comes to mind.

[Shadesofnight]

Okay, my attempt to backup the forums with HTTrack has failed with the entertaining error of: 02:21:27 Panic: Too many URLs, giving up..(>100000)

 

So I'll leave the forum backup to the more knowledgeable CreeperLava

 

Giftfish/Moho, can you tell me how you find those extra BSN Projects that don't appear to come up in a usual search? Since the existing 544 or so pages indicates only 5440 projects.

 

Also, do you have the address for the pages that have: the patches and the blogs?

 

I've got to head to work now, but I'll hunt down something else to focus on backing up when I get home.

[Tarshana]

Which part of the forums were you on? I've been downloading in chunks, so far I have http://www.mediafire.com/download/988ortjt3hcb37k/Bioware+Forums+-+Bioware.zip (bioware forum/bioware/BSN help, Mech, Legacy, Archived and Social groups) .

Edit: Yeah some of those projects are group read only. I'm hoping my request for opening messaging on the BSN legacy will be approved so I can go in there for projects. There are community contest content I can't see at all :(

[Almostfaceman]

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 :smile: 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.

 

Wow, as a community member and mod user, thanks for this.

[CreeperLava]

Ok, if you want to help download forums.bioware.com with HTTrack, make sure you have a good bandwidth. There's no use in downloading the same thing multiple times if your download speed is slower than mine. My HTTrack is downloading at about 120 KB/s, Tarshana's 240 KB/s. Instructions to avoid the "too many links" error :

In Mirror > Modify Options

- Scan Rules : uncheck gif, jpg, jpeg...

- Limits : Max external depth :0

Site size limit : something really big like 9999999999999999. We don't want the download to stop randomly because it thinks the site is too big^^.

Same for max transfer rate and max number of links, just put many 9s.

- Flow Control : Number of connections : 10

 

Torrents : Follow this guide I made : http://i.imgur.com/2kmDlZJ.png

https://download.transmissionbt.com/files

Then open transmission > File > New.

In the window that opens, select a source folder ; add these trackers :

udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80

And click OK. Once it's done, click Open and send us the .torrent.

 

I can't really know which part HTTrack is downloading, the way it works isn't really linear. I set it to download everything in forums.bioware.com, but I don't think there's any particular order.