I wasn’t sure how to pose my question clearly…can anyone offer a relatively painless way of exporting/capturing/saving one’s CH posts. Many of my CH posts serve as my and my hubby’s travel diary (when I travel, I always keep a written diary; however, my CH posts went into much more detail about the food we ate on our trips).
Short of the arduous task of cutting-and-pasting posts into a Word doc, is there a more elegant solution? I’m scared if CH does go belly up, then I will lose all of that content that I’ve generated.
Apologies if this has been already addressed either here or on CH. Please direct me to the relevant discussion if it has already taken place.
Some with a “Free” weekend could write a scraper. The technical approach depends on how much client side javascript is on the site. If it’s minimal, most people would write in Python, run through an HTML parser, pick out certain DOM elements that include the text, dates, and posters. That script would be special-purpose to CH as it currently exists. I lack the enthusiasm to do it myself.
FYI - writing this is probably against the terms-of-service of CH. However, that can’t exactly be enforced against the scraper, if they scrape only a few articles, and don’t log in, and maybe use an anonymizer ( a service that directs your traffic through other servers ).
Then the question of how to upload an entire thread. Someone familiar with discuss could opine.
NOW - the legal bits. When you post to a site, part of opening an account is USUALLY a terms of service that states ownership transfers to the site. If so, CH owns what we all wrote, almost certainly. Or it could be a “permissive license” where they get ownership and we get ownership. If the TOS is the latter, pasting in HO (regardless of tech) is A-OK.
But if the TOS transfers ownership, pasting to HO would give them reasonable legal status to sue - especially since they can claim harm, decreased traffic - and shut down HO. Unless you can read the CH TOS - and read it covering the time you posted as well as now - and can make a clear legal case to yourself that CH does not own copyright.
So — my personal opinion would be to let it go. Such is the nature of social media, just start posting to a better place.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. I have no intention of cutting-and-pasting into HO. Keeping the CH posts/threads would be for my personal use.
I chatted with my hubby, who is way more tech-savvy than I though I’m no slouch, about the solution you propose and he agreed that it would be fairly complex and requiring a lot of time and effort.
I think I will have to simply cut-and-paste into Word those posts that mean the most to me.
For a Mac: Open the thread of interest, Command-P to print, and select “Save to PDF” in the pull-down and save the resulting PDF of the thread to your computer. You’ll loose a lot of the pretty formatting, but all the text will be there and reasonably readable.
same here, i am going to cut and paste my voluminous amounts of reviews, at least. they’re for me, not HO but i don’t want to lose them. I too use them as a food diary, and as reference. Thanks for asking the question.
