In light of concerns regarding the forum's pending doom, I've decided to release the script I use to archive the game database. You can find it on my Github.

The last time I tried it took somewhere short of an hour and produced a 3MB dump. This could be a hell of a lot quicker, but we're fetching many small pages and trying to be kind on the server. Unlike my actual forum backup, this is small enough to be comfortably manageable with JSON.

In conjunction with the one Chris released which operates on the forum, I'm hoping
we can satisfy data hoarders and, more importantly, ensure that all the hard work on the part of our amazing editors is preserved for years to come.

I also figured this wouldn't be a bad time for a little update. We are aware of the errors some of you have been getting when trying to visit and interact with the forum, and aside from some personal speculation are just as clueless. I'm doing what I can with what I have to chase it down.

In the meantime, rest assured that I've been running a pretty scalable off-sight backup solution, automatically grabbing everything for a couple months now. As such, this isn't a cry for help. The script is more for fun than necessity.

Oh how I wish I could just copy the database, sit back and have a beer. But alas, no server access means the actual process has involved more code than I like to think about toward a solution that will never end up quite as thorough as it could be. If the site were ever to go down, I'd need about a full day to develop a minimalistic browser and bring it online, at which point I'm reasonably sure the hosts will have said hello. In short, we shouldn't ever be losing more than a month or so of content, which would totally suck but have nothing on our sixteen years and counting.