disappearing forum archives

For some years I have been relying on a forum thread on the above descriptor about half-tooth change wheels etc. This thread was advised to me by a mystery email in 2019.

Identity

**LINK**

May have been alerted to this by a moderator ??

Anyway with talk of new forum software I am fearful that this thread may imminently disappear. Any suggestions on preserving this for future access. Online preferably. I have an aversion to printing out miles of paper..

TIA for any advice. Regards, Les

The forums for sister publications have been changed over with no loss of old threads so I would expect the same when this forum changes to the new software.

Hi Les, If your worried about a thread disappearing and don't want to make paper prints, you can print to a pdf file instead and save it on your computer.

When reading posts that are of particular interest to me, on MEW and other sites, and want to keep them for future reference, I copy the parts that I want to keep and paste them into a Word document. Do it as you are reading thru a document and you don't have to remember where they came from.

Paul.

Les, two things spring to mind; these really only apply to a desktop machine, rather than a phone.
I use Windows 10 and Opera browser as my preferred method of accessing this forum.
I'm sure there will be a similar method with other browsers and operating systems.

1) Open the thread and bookmark it.
2) Open the first page of the thread, right click and "save as a pdf" in your preferred location on your hard drive.
Do the same thing for Page 2; P1 comes out at 1.8Meg, P2 is about 0.8meg.

Bill

I have saved some forum pages in the past, and the "save pdf file" option does not work consistently, often either distorting the page, or truncating it prematurely.

Another option I ran across recently is to save a page as an html file.

An html file is created, as well as an accompanying folder, which must remain together, and used as a unit.

If you open the html file, the web browser will open an identical forum page, complete with all the photos, even if you are offline. I have not tried this yet with this forum.

And an added bonus is that within the file folder is all of the jpg photo files.

This is a great option for me, and it reproduces an exact copy.

I will try it here and see if it works.

.

I tried the "save page as" and used the html format, and it did indeed save this page, complete with all the blinking adverts and such (LOL, some things work too well), and it is identical.

I unplugged my network cable, and opened the html file that I saved, and the page appears perfectly without being connected to the internet.

I use firefox, and there is a pulldown box on the upper right to access the "save-as" comand.

I will attach screen captures of the pulldown box, and of the image that appears on my screen without being connected to the internet.  You can scroll up and down on the page created just as if you were online, but you cannot post anything to it, at least I don't know how to add to an offline html file.

Edited By PatJ on 01/03/2021 05:55:33

Edited By PatJ on 01/03/2021 05:57:10

My normal method for printing web pages (including these) to pdf is first to do a File > Print Preview.

This shows how the pages will look in the pdf and whether it will print correctly (some websites - not this one - will only print the first page). It also allows you to scale the output (which means, here, that you can eliminate the boxes at the right-hand side). There are page orientation and other options too.

I then print to the pdf printer client ..... in my case Bullzip which allows me to append the print to a previous pdf file - handy for getting related pages in one file.