# Archiving an inactive discourse forum

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 31, 2016, 8:27am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025 "2016-05-31T08:27:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![dirkcuys](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/dirkcuys/32/106643_2.png) [@dirkcuys](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dirkcuys)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 8:27am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/1 "2016-05-31T08:27:24Z")

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I need to archive a forum running discourse (not because discourse is not great, just because the forum isn’t active anymore). I thought about going the **wget** / **httrack** route, but that won’t work since the client side JavaScript will still try to fetch data via the APIs.

Is there a recommended way to archive a discourse forum?

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 8:49am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/2 "2016-05-31T08:49:13Z")

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Did you switch it to read only? That is the first step.

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### Author: ![dirkcuys](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/dirkcuys/32/106643_2.png) [@dirkcuys](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dirkcuys)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 10:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/3 "2016-05-31T10:04:28Z")

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Thanks, I changed it to read only. What do you recommend as a next step to move the site towards a static HTML site that I can serve using GitHub pages or AWS CloudFront?

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### Author: ![fefrei](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/fefrei/32/119538_2.png) [@fefrei](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fefrei)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 11:40am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/4 "2016-05-31T11:40:33Z")

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You could try crawling the HTML-only view mostly designed for search engines.

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 2:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/5 "2016-05-31T14:48:59Z")

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Also a good idea, crawl using the Google webcrawler user agent.

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### Author: ![system](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/system/32/443519_2.png) [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2019, 2:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/6 "2019-01-26T02:45:16Z")

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### Author: ![system](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/system/32/443519_2.png) [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2022, 4:06am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-an-inactive-discourse-forum/45025/7 "2022-01-28T04:06:59Z")

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