offline browsing - archiving

[Steven Avery]

My vBulletin forum www.purebibleforum.com , that I use mostly as a blog, has a glitch, pages changing to white no data occasionally. 

PhP error, likely, according to the vBulletin forum, where they are helping the analysis.
https://www.vbulleti...becomes-white-screen

My plans are to consider a change of forum software, but that is really based on other considerations. Xenforo has made a big splash, and there is another I am checking out.  One good thing on vBulletin is that after my initial expense of a couple of hundred many years back, they have had virtually no additional expense. (I have skipped the upgrade to 5 anyway.)

Part of my solution was having the host (Liquid Web) give me an earlier version, I get the data of the one page, source, send it to some notes, and then put the regular MYSQL data back.  Something I should learn to do myself.  And that is working fine.

======================

In the midst of all that I figured this would be a superb time to really see if the website can be handled well by an offline browser.  I decided to try two that are free with decent reputations and reasonably active:

HttTrack - https://www.httrack.com/

CyoTech WebCopy - https://www.cyotek.com/cyotek-webcopy

======================

These things can be SLOW.

HttTrack has done 1 1/3 Gigabtye in about 13 hours.   My guess is that it is halfway done.
Cyotek seems similar.

Hmm.. I usually ignore multi-threaded download accelerators, they might help here.

Of course, this is something I might do once a month or two, unattended, so speed is not that important.

Your thoughts on the motif, tools, speed alternatives?

If I have an offline browser on my disk (the software changes all the urls to disk locations), and I have a website glitch on a single page/thread, I will not have to bother upstairs with the host. I could simply go to a functioning earlier version of that page, and in 10 minutes, rebuild it as a new thread. (The url will change, no big deal.)

Steven

[wraith808]

Well, if you're using it as a blog, why not try blogging software?  Forums on WordPress are actually pretty well implemented for the forum use, and of course blogging is well implemented. Or is that not an option?

[Steven Avery]

Well, if you're using it as a blog, why not try blogging software?  Forums on WordPress are actually pretty well implemented for the forum use, and of course blogging is well implemented. Or is that not an option?

-wraith808 (December 14, 2018, 08:33 AM)

Definitely an option.  However, I have liked the structure and editing and picture handling of the vBulletin forum.  It is naturally designed for topics to be top-down. 

In my business world, we used to use WordPress with WooCommerce.  We switched to a hosted specialty industry site.

So I am considering a return to WordPress for certain types of blogging and landing pages.  However, I will be slow to change PureBibleForum away from a forum, it has done a good job for me overall, and I am familiar with things like secret sections, moving threads, moderating posts from new members (there is a little bit of that use) etc.

Steven

[wraith808]

I've used bbPress and BuddyPress.  Of the two, I liked bbPress better, and it had most of the functionality of SMF (which I used before) easily accessible.  I had to add a separate plugin for polls, but that wasn't difficult either.  I haven't used them in a couple of years (both were for guilds, and the groups that I was using them for either broke up, or I stopped playing the games that we were using it for), but I imagine that they have only become better in the interim.

A couple of articles on Forum plugins:

https://www.wpbeginn...ugins-for-wordpress/

https://themegrill.c...press-forum-plugins/


Oh, and as a plus, I was running on LiquidWeb infrastructure also, so they were very compatible with that.

[Shades]

@Steven Avery:
What about running a tool like XAMPP locally, implement the forum software of choice there, Make your additions (blogs) on that local instance and when done, dump the content from the local database and upload that into the remote hosted version of your blog/forum?

You would have a fully functioning backup this way, and with local tool like XAMPP it is usually much easier & faster to try out what blog/forum software you like best. And XAMPP comes by default with PHPMyadmin, with which you can easily make dumps from the database and it is also handy when uploading the dumped content into a remote database.  And if you are willing to invest more time to learn, you can automatize the mirroring of databases (if your ISP allows for this).

Having a local copy makes it also easier to troubleshoot problems like the blank page you experience. and once you found it, it will be easy to implement the fix at the remote site. It will help if your local server matches the server at your ISP. With that I mean that both should have the same operating system if possible. The rest of the hardware does not have to match, but if it does that's a bonus.

The above might sound complicated, but once you have such a setup, you'll wonder how you got on without it. Dumping databases and re-uploading them maybe takes 15 minutes in total, but that depends on the quantity of content, the bandwidth between the computer you use for the upload and the remote server and the resources available on the server at the moment you do the the upload (to a shared server).

Creating such a setup will give you also more insight in how the combination of websites, web server and database server work. It might seem daunting, but it isn't that difficult. 

[Steven Avery]

I've used bbPress and BuddyPress.  Of the two, I liked bbPress better, and it had most of the functionality of SMF (which I used before) easily accessible.  I had to add a separate plugin for polls, but that wasn't difficult either.  I haven't used them in a couple of years (both were for guilds, and the groups that I was using them for either broke up, or I stopped playing the games that we were using it for), but I imagine that they have only become better in the interim.

A couple of articles on Forum plugins:

https://www.wpbeginn...ugins-for-wordpress/
https://themegrill.c...press-forum-plugins/

Oh, and as a plus, I was running on LiquidWeb infrastructure also, so they were very compatible with that.

-wraith808 (December 14, 2018, 01:08 PM)

Thanks wraith.

I am ready to dump, or greatly reduce my reliance on, vBulletin because of the dilemna.  I have hit some tricky, frustrating problems on v. 4 (perhaps when posts have too many urls or pictures, I am going to experiement a bit), and pretty much everybody agrees that a move (especially to Xenforo, also possibly others like you recommend) is likely a better alternative in my type of situation than trying to go to version 5 ( CARM is a board that did that move.)

Xenforo is not free, but in this case, since it is integral to my writing and thinking livelihood, it gets my first consideration. 

Liquid Web is really a great outfit.  Again, maybe you can save some $$ on A,B,C but when you want voice tech-help, they are there, with real names, in the USA, lots of savvy, and your successful resoluation being their concern.  Our business had to move away from them for a hosted package, for our main website, but I am sticking with them for lots of stuff, on one reasonably priced server.  The usage may include some auxiliary landing pages, blogs and such from the biz, so then the $60 a month or so is not so daunting, as it might be for only private use.

[Steven Avery]

@Steven Avery:
What about running a tool like XAMPP locally, implement the forum software of choice there, Make your additions (blogs) on that local instance and when done, dump the content from the local database and upload that into the remote hosted version of your blog/forum

-Shades (December 15, 2018, 03:04 AM)

I've done that a bit in the past.  When the vBullein was working excellently, that seemed like more overhead.

However, I am going to reconsider it now, especially since I am actually thinking of various sites relating to my Bible stuff, and two businesses (one is e-commerce of precious metals, and the second relates to solar.) 

If  I am going to really widen my scope in 2019, the home-base alternative should be revisited.

[wraith808]

Liquid Web is really a great outfit.  Again, maybe you can save some $$ on A,B,C but when you want voice tech-help, they are there, with real names, in the USA, lots of savvy, and your successful resoluation being their concern.  Our business had to move away from them for a hosted package, for our main website, but I am sticking with them for lots of stuff, on one reasonably priced server.  The usage may include some auxiliary landing pages, blogs and such from the biz, so then the $60 a month or so is not so daunting, as it might be for only private use.

-Steven Avery (December 15, 2018, 07:32 AM)

You've basically outlined why I stay with them, even though it costs a bit more.