Hello all,
my nerves are blank - pretty much exhausted.
And this posting finally got way too long than intended. Shall I split it somehow into 2-3 parts?
I know how you must have felt DaKanga for the past weeks.
Nice, I could also save several of my posts including various cross links to other interesting general / French or Spanish posts from long-term users.
Saving each archive.ph link with title and thread_id/comment_id link individually was not really planned by me.
I am even surprised I could rescue a few things as I am busy with other stuff in my personal life.
I wish I had some time to play around with true recursive tools.
I)
I installed a small CSV tool today (borrowed Laptop got an unplanned Windows reinstall 2-3 weeks ago), sorted the second title column and found that a few created posts were still missing.
The good news is that some of the threads/comments are still accessible over Google cache.
If you still have the concrete link you wanted to save or the comment_id (=thread_id) from the forum-posts.csv there is at least a 30-40:60 chance that you still can access it next days/weeks and save it locally with EverNote or send the cached page with the browser extension to archive.ph.
Example forum-posts.csv
Comment_id, Title, message
123456789, MyTitleOfmycreatedPost (non blank), message,...
Now go to google.com and enter forum.duolingo.com/comment/123456789 or www.duolingo.com/comment/123456789 if your thread is much older.
If it is listed as indexed (I guess they might fall out from the index when the bots can't access anymore or sitemap/robots.txt disallows the visit) you often can click the small arrow button and choose "Cache" from the option popup window.
Hopefully the cached content is not overwritten too quickly by the new splash screen.
Once the website on Google cache is correctly displayed with the expected comments and your text you can click the archive icon at the top right corner so the bot can do its job.
Example:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... clnk&gl=de
https://archive.ph/DcUSP
archive.ph itself also supports some hints like Google Cache if it can't find your comment/thread.
But it only shows this if you remove the first https:// and don't try to enter an absolute unique url.
Be aware that the new syntax is forum.duolingo.com. Older threads were previously saved as www.duolingo.com. I got totally confused on my older threads were the link names were different and I didn't find that string in my text document.
So it makes sense to enter star.duolingo.com/comment/123456789star (especially the "*" star is important if more title text was appended to the url) for the search keyboard on archive.ph website.
Many times it offers you to follow the Google Cache link.
If not you can go to google.com directly and enter your constructed thread_id URL link and test for yourself what is possible.
It may happen that a few threads have not been visited for a longer time so most recent comments are missing.
I ran into that issue with a German thread from the languages listing.
With that tactic I was able to recover 2-3 more threads after the forums closing down and I will keep an eye on what threads of my own I have initially missed searching back and forth the forum and google.
II)
The quickest thing to do with an Excel / OpenOffice table program (single smaller CSV programs exist too!) for me was to resort all the 36,234 rows and order them by title desc or asc.
As you probably know, the title column is blank for threads you have NOT created for yourself, but which you only have posted to.
It is a bit sad that all the archive.ph pages to subsequent https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/... links were not automatically replaced in a page when you referenced other posts or there is an index listing.
Or that an archive.ph web page still links to the forum.duolingo.com URLs on the main page.
Would have been nice if archive.ph new by itself how to reconstruct an index or linked post.
So you all did a much better job reconstructing the threads manually!
I don't think I can use / publish my saved thread texts directly and further posted comments therein as the archive.ph subsequent cross-referenced post numbers are always missing.
Anyway, some are now at least available/saved, even it means we are having to waste our time to probably restruct them to its fullest like you guys are doing it here for weeks on the Duome forums.
III)
In case you might have missed the one thread talking about EverNote, here it is.
"Using Evernote to save copies of threads easily and efficiently": https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/56936060
Archive link: https://archive.ph/7JTda
You can still do this from Google cache pages, were available (and up to date), too.
Sorry, I have not tried it yet.
IV)
Basically, I feel so bad that I lost all/most of my big followed thread list; some of the last 5+ years were indeed interesting and truly worth of a FULL backup.
But to play around with IT tools, scripts, recursive levels and auto replacement strings it would have taken me weeks to months to get a headstart.
Couldn't push myself checking more out about this horrible "lazy loading" (and freezing) of threads or topic subscriptions.
There was one user offering me a script in my created IT leecher thread, but I didn't really have my head free to go into this stuff last days and weeks.
Surprisingly, nobody from Duolingo admins/developers responded back with a concrete manual and tool usage / suggestion list. Not there, not in any official threads.
Do you know if anyone of them tried to save a few interesting threads for themselves internally? Didn't they run into the same issues like us?
I also had opened a bug report and told staff how useless their Data Vault file actually is without any RE: thread titles.
I can't correlate my exported comments to any comment ids as the thread_id and thread_title is missing!
..(...)..
V)
There was for me another major problem with the download url through Drive-Thru.
I found the solution, working now on a PC with Firefox (Nightly), Chrome, etc. or smartphone browser (Chrome Dev@Android did its job to ignore the last dot).
First you have to remove the final "." dot at the end of the download link from the e-mail.
Indeed, a webpage will be opened where a blue button "Download personal data" is shown.
Stated in the e-mail: https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/download/123456789/ABCdEFgh.
Just remove the "." dot at the end and edit the URL to this: https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/download/123456789/ABCdEFgh
The Duolingo FAQ https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/a ... ement-FAQ- says you can still download your Data vault file until 01. May 2022 if you had requested soon enough (before 22. March)!!
So if you might have missed it and you are unsure what personal created threads you have all forgotten (which you can hopefully save from Google cache next days), check it out!
Sorry that this opening post (my first one here) got so long.
But if you know me already for years, you're probably used to this style anyway
I am open to any splitting or formatting suggestions by moderators.
Is there any better place to write about this detail stuff than this "Closing forums" thread? Will it catch anyone's attention?
Have a good day / night.
Best regards from Germany