What would you like done?
I have a CVS from a manual scrape of a pbpBB forum. No admin on that site, so no email addresses, passwords, etc. Columns for username, topic, forum breadcrumbs, text and quoted text. I am stuck on the API part, and honestly, not a coder. I don’t have user emails, but I’d like to have it where I can recover their account manually if needed.
When do you need it done?
Not immediately. I’m planning right now, so I’m looking for costs and maybe some reliable advice on how to best find people. I know I can search on UpWork, but this is the heart of the empire, so I’d like some advice from people with a stake in the community.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
A few hundred dollars. 300-500 seems doable.
I don’t guess you have a separate table for the users?
I’ll take a look and see what I can do within your budget.
Since contacting people whose email address you don’t have is pretty much what everyone on the planet wants you not to be able to do, that’s rather a challenge. The best thing to do would be to create a link on that forum (if they’d let you) telling peoplle you set the site up and to come log in there. They could then “prove” to you which account was theres and you’d change the email address for them by hand.
Thanks for your response, Jay - and the link. I really appreciate the personal outreach.
I don’t have a table for the users. I mean, I could generate one by pulling it out of the posts CSV, of course, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
For contacting them, I don’t need or want to. If it is feasible, we could even assign a dummy email address to our domain for the time being, and manually change accounts if someone requests access via their new account, they could certainly have it. That’s unlikely; and I figure an email to the admin would be the only solution worth exploring labor and cost wise. It’s a dying community I’m trying to preserve historically before entropy does the job - it’s important to a friend.