Save Your Private Messages!

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As you probably know, I've been hard at work on our community's transition to the new message boards software for some time. While most of the juicy details regarding this are posted in the private SPS forum, where I make rather lengthy reports about my progress and various (many) obstacles encountered along the way, there is one rather significant issue that demands public attention of all the current members, because it affects most of you.

Namely, private messages (PMs) WILL NOT IMPORT INTO THE NEW MESSAGE BOARDS. I hope I've put it in big enough letters.

The reason behind this decision of mine is that while there is an importer module to import our PMs into the new message boards software, a test import has shown that the PM import results in such a godawful mess that what PMs actually do get transferred over, are in such a state that they are next to unusable.

So, to spare everyone the effort of wading through the PM mess on the new message boards, I've decided that the PMs up to the point of the board switch will remain on the current boards only.

Getting to the point, this means that YOU WILL NEED TO SAVE ANY PRIVATE MESSAGES YOU WANT TO KEEP TO YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Most of us have quite a few PMs stored here on BoM, but probably only a handful we actually want or need to save to maybe read again at some later point.

Here is a step-by-step guide on saving your PMs from our boards to your hard drive:

General Tips Before You Start Saving

- Don't open more than 15 private message tabs or windows in your browser at once. Depending on your system and/or browser, doing this several times could crash your browser or make it unresponsive.
- Check every PM thread and delete those that you have no need for any more or don't want to keep.
- Once you have saved the PMs you want to keep locally, you will probably want to delete them from BoM. This isn't a necessary step, but it will make the entire process more organized for you.

Saving in Internet Explorer

1) Access your PM area on the boards by clicking on the my profile & private messages link on the top right side of the message boards.

2) Open your PMs one by one, deleting those you don't want to keep by clicking on the "Delete Private Message" link on the top or bottom left side of every PM thread.

You can also delete multiple PMs by ticking the boxes next to them on the main PM thread list (link above) and clicking the "Delete Checked Messages" button at the bottom of the list.

3) Save the PMs you want to keep by first opening them. Once you have a PM thread before you, go to IE's "File" menu (or click on the pen & paper icon in IE7) and choose "Save As..." from among the dropdown options.

A "Save Webpage" window will pop up, allowing you to select where and how to save the page you are currently viewing. I suggest you create a new folder called "BoM Private Messages", and save the PMs in there.

While saving PMs, be careful how you save them, which depends on the "Save as Type:" option you are presented with in every "Save Webpage" window. There are 4 different options: complete, single file, HTML only or text file.

"Complete" and "single file" options will produce the same result completeness-wise, the only difference being that the "single file" option will pack everything into one file, while the "complete" option will make a html file and a connected directory to store all the images and similar files in (for every thread, not just once).

The "HTML only" option will not save any images and related files locally (meaning that once this is deleted from SP, or if you are viewing such saved PMs without Internet access, no pictures in the posts will display), but all the text and the basic look will still be saved. This option is useful in case you get saving errors for some reason with the above two preferred options.

The last option is "text only", which you should just make sure you never use.

Once you have selected the proper place to save a PM and chosen the type of saving you want (check this every time - it usually resets), click the Save button.

4) Repeat the above process for every PM you want to save. Once you are done, you will have a local browser-viewable archive of all the important private messages that you will be able to access at any time.

Saving in Firefox

WARNING: Firefox is not my recommended browser for this saving operation. Its "complete" saving option does not produce a result as clean as IE's. It also does not use page titles when saving PM pages, meaning you will have to manually rename every PM. You have been warned.

More or less everything applies as above. The only difference is that in Firefox, go to the "File" menu and select "Save Page As...". Firefox does not have the "single file" saving option like IE does, so simply use the "complete" option or resort to "HTML only" in case of any saving problems.

Finally...

There will still be time to do this after the transition to the new message boards, yes. The old boards will be left online for some time after the switch in read-only form, and you will still be able to access your profile to deal with the private messages.

The legacy boards will not remain online indefinitely, however. So, if you are reading this now, I urge you to save your PMs at your earliest convenience, so that once we go through with the switch (soon), you will have only the PMs you have received since your clean-up to save.

If there are any questions regarding all this, please don't hesitate to ask here. If you know someone who has been active here in the past and isn't any more, please send them a link to this thread so that they will know about the need to save their PMs too.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding!

[ September 28, 2007, 23:46: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

There is still an easier way than that. In IE and Firefox, if you right-click inside any given page, you will find a "View Source" (IE) and "View Page Source" (Firefox) option. I'm sure Opera has it too.

Click that, and the source code of the entire page shows. Then simply select it all (ctrl+a, ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v) the contents into a blank txt file (you can use Notepad or the equivalent to create a new file) and save it. If Notepad allows you to save the file with a .htm extension, choose it when saving. If not, simply change the extension from .txt to .htm manually.

What you get is more or less the same that you would have using the "HTML only" option in browser saving. You'll only be missing pictures from the PMs.

Edit: On further testing, I've found an even easier option, and this one grabs all the pictures too.

Simply select the entire PM page contents (click inside the text somewhere, and press ctrl+a and ctrl+c), then paste it all (ctrl+v) into a new MS Word document. It'll take a short while and won't look exactly as on SP, but it'll be a pretty good approximation and less work than the suggestion above. Then simply save the document and repeat the process as needed.

This suggestion might work with OpenOffice as well, so if someone could test it on that, please report here if it works.

[ September 29, 2007, 14:14: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

It only takes a few seconds in Word, so it's apparently much faster. This is with an Athlon 3500+, 2GB RAM and Windows XP.

 

I just tried it with OpenOffice and it took just a couple seconds with Windows XP, 2GB RAM and an E6600.

 

Well, printing them out is one option too...