Paid addon - Donate if you want it on the site! There is no way to export personal messages

On the old forum there was an option to export/back up the entire inbox into csv or xml format. There is no such option anymore.

Can this be added back, please? It was very useful in keeping up with contacts and conversations.

 

15 pounds

 

That does seem to be the call to action increasingly often, lately.

Unfortunately, a donation asks for no financial obligations on the receivers part. There is zero guarantee that the money would be used for whatever I donated it for, nor does it leave any viable repercussions if it is not. Therefore it is completely unacceptable method of paying for this feature.

I might consider specifically buying the addon for the forum to use, or even code a solution myself (it's such a basic thing, it shouldn't take more than weekend afternoon).

 

It could also be possible to simply dump the archive page using wget, I don't know how to make it access the page as if you were logged in, but once it can, a simple "wget -mkK http:/your.mom" would probably be enough to allow you to see them offline.

I think it's understandable that some get irritated at the increased call for donation for stuff that was included de facto before. But that kind of issue is inherent to changing the forums' platform. In the end the change will be for the better I think.

 

I see druids point, I donated when the site was down. Did I ever get message back from anybody saying, hey thanks for the donation. We have no idea how many donations were accepted when the site was down.

What makes this forum useful/popular are members like Druid that have posted 9 years of valuable information. So when a senior member questions where feature is, and the reply is "15 pounds" yeah I'd be kind of pissed off by that

 

The issue has been addressed. You go no message because the site wasn't functional. Normally we
send out messages.

Thanks for your support.

 

As far as I know, Paypal donations cannot be disputed. Only money sent as payment for goods/services.

Over 9 years I've seen and heard enough to be cautious.

I found a userscript that allows for saving messages, it is a bit cumbersome (since it processes the already processed html blob), and required a small fix to the regex code so it saves images properly, but otherwise it worked fine. Luckily I already had a recent save, so I did not need to go through that many messages. I knew I should have logged in to make a save back during the downtime, when I noticed the site to be working for a few minutes.
Actually, is there still a backup of the old forum online somewhere? Then I could just log in to grab my inbox using the old vbulletin software.

The site does look a lot more professional now, I give it that. Let's see just how long that will last.