Yeah feedback on the language is welcome. It was updated to “request” instead of “download” because the download isn’t instant when you click the button. Depending on how much activity your account has it may take the system a few minutes to prepare the file for download (and you receive a message once it’s ready).
Make “Request archive” just be a simple unnamed download icon button.
And after
Download an archive of your account activity and preferences.
just mention “you’ll get notified when it’s ready.”
And, many users just want their preferences not their activity, and many others want the opposite. So do consider not gluing them together. Have separate downloads. Or have all three buttons, A, P, A+P.
Okay, there’s certainly many categories in the zip.
Perhaps just have a bunch of checkboxes so that user can configure what he’s about to download.
And wait a second, what about importing preferences in?
Okay the preferences.json… is so packed with stuff that we didn’t actually generate ourselves. So maybe there ought to be a second diet version that only contains things that we set ourselves when editing our preferences.
Actually Facebook, Google, etc. all allow users to pick and choose what stuff they want in the archive that will be produced. Some even have an index.html in the archive to make it “more friendly” than just a bunch of files.
The first URL in the original posting points to a topic which points to unmaintained uploader code.
At the moment, I am giving some advice to a colleague on establishing a new discourse instance.
What is the state‑of‑play regarding exporting site configurations in machine and human‑readable form? And importing site configurations in machine‑readable form.
At the moment and under admin rights, I am reduced to taking a set of screenshots of my ☰ ▸ Admin ▸ Settings … Only show overridden, stripping these together in GIMP, and forwarding the resulting PNG to my friend for viewing. Kinda clumsy.