Can I download a forum for offline viewing?

I’ve copied HTML files from a forum that I thought was going to be deleted. You could try that.

You could run wget -r <url> or use a GUI website downloader such as HTTrack if you take @incendiary_dan‘s advice.

I used wget to get all the stuff on fluther. It took forever but it worked. And if you use wget make sure to use something like —wait=20 so you don’t hammer the server.

I want to download a forum not as HTML but as a PDF document. How to do that?

You’ll need to download the HTML first and convert to PDF as a second step. Note that a developed forum with 1,000+ members may have hundreds of thousands of pages and will likely result in a multi-GB PDF file.

I downloaded wget.exe as I have window xp and installed But I don’t know what to do next? Do I have to write some command in command prompt? The forum will have different url’s for different sections/topics.So what command should I use?

Open a command prompt, and make sure wget is installed under a PATH variable. In other words, simply type wget to see if it spits out a few lines of text. If not, you’ll have to replace the command with C:\...\wget.exe.

Next, create a folder which will store the HTML files and navigate to the directory with cd <dir>. (You may drag the folder from your desktop or Windows Explorer to the command prompt to automatically write the directory name after typing cd.) Then execute something like wget -r —wait=2 http://forum-url.com/. (That’s two hyphens before wait. Fluther typesets it as an en dash.)

nothing is showing in that folder now…I didn’t let the process to complete because I guess we can continue with it later? I stopped it ans wanted to see what has been downloaded, I can’t find anything.

That’s odd. If it looked as if it was downloading tons of files, they’re probably on your computer somewhere. If you find them, you should be able to run the command again (possibly with -c after the wget command), but if not you can try HTTrack to see if you will have more luck.

yeah it looked like it already had downloaded many files but the folder in which they were supposed to be was empty.