HowTo mirror a phpBB3 forum via wget
I ran a phpBB3 forum for several years and activity has been slowing down step by step. Now I thought I'd get rid of that old, security-impaired (read seldomly updated) phpBB3 forum and mirror it as plain HTML files. After Googling a bit I found an entry at superuser.com stating that I could use wget which I thought of as "brilliant"! Using wget -k -m -E -p -np -R memberlist.php*,faq.php*,viewtopic.php*p=*,posting.php*,search.php*,ucp.php*,viewonline.php*,*sid*,*view=print*,*start=0* -o log.txt 'http://www.example.com/forum/' I tried to fetch the whole forum while excluding many of the useless pages (reporting posts, sending private messages, ...). Soon I noticed that I got nearly *no* pages - all were deleted because of the reject list. Checking the logfile it turned out that I had a session id (sid) in all the URLs and they are rejected as per the -R parameter above. Also it did not even try to fetch many pages as they…
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