Hello. I expect the answer to this will not be what I would like to hear, as I know Discourse focuses on security and privacy, but I’d at least like to know if this is possible.
I come from a Discourse forum where the administration team has made some decisions recently that the large majority of site users do not agree with. As such, we are currently in the process of finding a new home for our discussion topics. Obviously, said administrators do visit Meta, so I will be refraining from giving any information that could identify me.
However, I was wondering if there might be any way to salvage the prior topics that we already have, without needing cooperation from the administrative team. Even archiving them somewhere would be far better than nothing. What might be the best way to go about saving these topics, or copying them somewhere else entirely?
How many topics need to be moved? Honestly copying by hand would be easiest, provided the number of topics is fairly small. You could probably write some code to automate this using the web crawler view and the Discourse API as well.
There are topics here about archiving discourse. Pulling them into another discourse won’t be easy, but I’ve written code to pull down a category, I think. (oh, it’s just a topic - - https://github.com/pfaffman/discourse-downloader).
I don’t suppose you have a budget. How many topics/categories?
Sorry for the delay in response, I have been sick.
We’d probably be looking a several hundred topics, of anywhere from 100 to 15,000 posts. We likely do not have a budget to pay for this if downloading the posts for free is an option.
On that note, how exactly is the program you linked meant to be run? Downloading them to offline storage sounds ideal.