How to archive a XenForo forum to make it read-only

[vbresults]

An add-on allowing read-only mode has been posted here.

 

[PeteUK]

I've been running a Xenforo forum since 2013 on a volunteer basis and it has now got too expensive for me to continue to fund it. This is because it's still on Xenforo 1.4.3 and so needs a very old version of PHP for which the hosting company are charging an arm and a leg. The forum has been effectively dormant for over 2 years (someone else has created another IMHO inferior forum), and although there are/were 300 members most were inactive even before, so in total only 2500 messages have ever been posted. It's not worth upgrading to a newer version of Xenforo, but I would like - if possible - to retain some sort of access to past messages. Can they be dumped out in some sort of useable format?

 

[chillibear]

Assuming all the posts are accessible publicly (and you are okay with loosing dynamic functionality like search) is to just crawl the forum using a "website downloader" - for instance (and there are plenty of others) Site Sucker or HTTrack - to create a static plain HTML version of the forum that you can host nice and cheaply and without any concern over having old versions of PHP and scripts that may have vulnerabilities, etc. How successful it will be can be a little hit/miss - I've not tried archiving a XF site before, but nothing to loose in trying. Once done you might want to tidy up the resulting pages a bit to remove things like broken search and so forth to produce a nice "archive" version.

I'd also be worth taking a database dump should you want to in the future do a "better" extract of the data in a more usable format (you could reload the SQL file back into MySQL and extract individual fields etc).