Private Messages from LemmingsForums.com

[namida]

Nope - I haven't forgotten about this at all! So, some of you may want your private messages from LemmingsForums.com transferred to here. I can *partially* do this. Here's the full details:

- I can import your inbox (and other received messages if you have more than one folder). No problems here at all.
- I could theoretically import sent messages, however it's probably slightly easier not to do this - primarily because if that user also gets their received messages imported, it'll most likely result in duplicates. Also, displaying who the message was sent to may be difficult.
- I'm not entirely sure if I can import custom labels, or if they'll all just have to end up in the main inbox.
- I can import PMs even if they're from a user who doesn't have an account here yet.
- If the old forum had a PM attachment feature at some point (I don't think it did though), I probably won't be able to import these.
- "Conversational View" will most likely be broken; they'll all just end up as individual PMs that aren't linked to any others.


If you would like to import your PMs, please follow these steps:

EDIT: Note; please disable anything you may have (browser extensions etc) that may interfere with the layout, such as custom CSS, GreaseMonkey scripts, etc. If you don't know what these are, you probably don't have any. (Just for reference, AdBlock doesn't interfere with it.)

1) Log in on the old forum
2) Go to Profile -> Account Settings -> Modify Profile -> Look and Layout
3) Set the time format to %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S
Note: you can skip steps 2 and 3 if your date and times are already displaying in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format
4) Go to your private messages
5) Go to Preferences > Change Settings
6) Select "All At Once" for the first option
7) Go back to your inbox
8) Use your browser's File > Save As option (or equivalent) and save as an HTML file; choose "HTML Only" from the dropdown box if that option is there. If you have more than one page of messages, you'll need to do this for each page (but I have set it to display 999 messages per page instead of only 15, so this is unlikely).
9) Repeat steps 5 and 6 for any other folders if you have any (you could also save a copy of your sent messages if you like)
10) Send this file to me via a private means of communication; ie: private message, email, etc. Do not post them in this topic.

When sending these, please include the following:
a) What browser you used to save the HTML file
b) If you have a custom timezone setting on the old forum, and what that is
c) Whether or not you already have some old PMs restored (from when I restored some from the January 2014 backup)

Just for reference - I'm not going to intentionally read through anyone's PMs, but I may have to view small snippets of them in the case of any difficulties with importing them (just to locate the cause of the problems). If this is problematic, you may want to consider another approach, such as saving as "Complete HTML file" and either storing it on your hard drive (or DropBox / OneDrive / similar) or sending it to yourself as a PM on here, though obviously this will mean they won't be included in your private message inbox here.

It's a known issue that all PMs imported this way appear to come from guests rather than actual accounts. This is something that I will fix sooner or later. If there's any other issues though, let me know.

[namida]

Sorry to anyone who already saved it as mentioned above. You'll need to do it again, paying attention to the steps 2 and 3 that I added to the list.

I changed the settings so most people's times/dates will already display this way, but if you've set a custom one, you'll have to change it.

[namida]

Alright, you can start sending me the HTML files now.

Warning: These files will (of course) contain all your PMs. Do NOT post them in this topic or anywhere else public (unless you don't mind people reading them). Send them to me via private message or email.

Please note that I might not do them right away; I'll probably wait until I've got a few and do a few sets at once (to minimize how many times I have to run the PM order fix script).


I've also PM'd the other admins (geoo and ccexplore) with info on how to add these, in case I'm not online or anyone would rather send them to a different admin. Do keep in mind that they might not be as able to troubleshoot any problems that occur with it, though.

[namida]

Some minor issues have been identified with the import process:

1) The code doesn't take into account that users may have set a custom timezone on the old board. So, when you send the file, please let me know if you do have a custom timezone setting (instead of the default there, which is UTC-6).
2) The code doesn't take into account that PMs that were in the January backup have already been imported, which causes these messages to be duplicated. So, when you send the file, let me know whether or not your pre-January PMs have already been imported.

[namida]

It appears the old Lemmings Forum has gone down without warning - I would say "good thing we moved before it did", but I highly suspect this was an intentional action on Adam's part. It's not something that's likely to happen randomly for no reason. I would've thought though that the least he could do is put up a redirect notice to the new board...

But anyway, this means that if you haven't already saved your PMs, they're not going to be recoverable (unless he also decides to be nice and give one of the staff members here a copy of the database). There's literally nothing I can do about this, sorry.

If you've already saved a copy but it didn't quite meet the above standards (eg: you saved it with the wrong timestamp format), I'll see what I can do with it...

[ccexplore]

It looks like the old forum is up again (well actually I never saw it went down temporarily).  But yeah, so happy we're no longer dependent on that anymore.  People who wants to save their PMs should go grab them as soon as possible before something worse and more permanent happens.

[namida]

I can't seem to access it, but that might be just me. At any rate, if it is back up (at least for some people), thanks for re-stickying the topic, and yes, everyone, if you want your PMs, grab them ASAP.

EDIT: Might not be up again after all. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ reports that it's down. Still, maybe we'll leave this here in case there are intermittent moments of it being up (or it hasn't gone down for everyone yet).

EDIT: Now it's saying the site is up, though I still can't access it myself.

EDIT: I tried accessing it on my phone (via 3G rather than the same wifi my PC is on). Same results; won't load.

EDIT: I'm now able to access it again on my phone's 3G, though in a very glitchy state. Still can't through PC / wifi.

[namida]

Seems to be back up, although glitchy.

If you want your PMs, grab them ASAP! Don't worry about whether I've fixed the tool's issues yet or not - you can get the HTML file now and we can do the actual import later; that's no big deal.

[ccexplore]

Yes, it looks a little glitchy but shouldn't affect the contents of your PMs.

======

It seems that as a side effect of making the old forum read-only, I can no longer view my sent box there anymore (you get the "you're not allowed" error message if you try). I know you said you weren't sure you are going to import those or not, but at the moment I'd have no way to make a backup of its contents there.  (Technically I do still have the backups made earlier via HTTrack, but it's not the most convenient of backups as things are scattered through multiple randomly-named pages, before you changed the settings to allow everything to fit on one page.)

[namida]

The main reason against importing those (from a Sent Messages folder - I should be able to import them from the recipient's received messages should they do it) is that unlike with received messages (which can be simply marked as guest senders), there's no way to specify anything other than an actual user as a recipient. Thus, it could cause problems with messages sent to users who don't have accounts there.

Still, I'll look into that soon so people can at least get an offline backup if nothing else.

[namida]

I've updated the tool to account for custom time zone settings (but I *do* need to know what your custom setting is) and to be able to ignore pre-January PMs.

So, feel free to send them in again, please let me know the following:

These are absolutely required to import them accurately
- Your timezone offset setting on the old forum (and whether this is relative to the forum default (UTC-6) or to UTC). If you haven't set one, please mention this rather than leaving me to guess.
- Whether or not you already have some PMs restored from the January 2014 database backup.
- Your exact username or your user ID number on this forum (not the old one), unless you're sending it to me via PM from the account you want them restored to.

These aren't strictly essential but will be very helpful in finding errors
- How many PMs you have total from the old board This one seems to be impossible to get other than by manually counting them now, and I'm almost certian my app gets this correctly, so don't worry about this one
- How many PMs you have from the old board that are before the January backup (the cutoff time is Thu, 09 Jan 2014 18:25:56 (UTC)), or the time and date of the last PM you received before this cutoff point
- Which browser you used to save the HTML file


As far as browsers go, so far it's been successful with IE, Firefox and Chrome / Chromium (so pretty much all the major browsers except Safari - and just to stress it, this isn't saying Safari doesn't work, it's just saying I haven't received any Safari-generated files yet). I see little if any reason why there'd be any it *wouldn't* work so well with; that's more a "just in case" thing.

[namida]

To anyone who's messages have already been imported: ccexplore noticed that for both his main account and Quizmaster, 3 PMs were missing, and for his personal account, it seemed to be the last 3 on the list. This is also consistent with some other cases where the count has been off by 3, though in these other cases the missing ones from the count were pre-January ones (whereas his were post-January ones).

He's mentioned that it's the last 3 on the HTML page that went missing; so to those who've had their messages imported already, can you check if something similar has happened in your cases? This will generally be either the 3 oldest or 3 newest messages, depending on your sort order when you saved the HTML page.

I'll be looking into why this is happening later today, but I'm asking this for two reasons:
1) So that I can get those last three messages for you if they are missing.
2) To see if it's consistently the last 3 that disappear.

[namida]

So, on that issue, it seems that only ccexplore/Quizmaster had this issue. In this case, it might be simpler to manually sort out this issue with them than attempt to look for bugs in the program, since it seems everyone else is fine without restoring PMs (or had no problems with the import)?

Anyway, I'm going to unsticky this topic now, since there have been no import requests for quite some time. Just to be clear, this does not mean you can no longer request an import.