Is there a way to export a thread to a file?

"As a game master, I would like to be able to have an offline copy of my game's forum threads so that I can easily search it for information."

I run my game in chapters/episodes. When I start a new episode thread, I lock the thread for the previous episode.

There is now a lot of useful information that I want to refer to in the older threads, but it is tedious to browse through the thread page by page. I would like to be able to download the thread to a file (any format: text, html, xml, json, etc) so that I can easily search it to find information (what was the name of the gem merchant?).

Maybe this is already possible?

User and hero among men and women, adamp, created a chrome plugin for this purpose. I'll see if I can find the link.

Ah, here it is.

The "One Page" tool alone is worth the price of admission, but I'm also planning on gathering it all offline. Optimally, I'd like to find an elegant way to print and bind it one day. Perhaps putting the OOC thread into the margins or something.

I'm no coder, but I was able to create a script within Google Docs which allows me to "clean" a copy-and-paste from a thread. I wanted to preserve things like bold text when speaking or italics when thinking and even color for OOC comments. Additionally, I wanted to know who made the post, so I put each post into it's own two row table, with the top line being the name of the poster (and color-coded) and the second being the actual post.

I also went as far as to perform some basic analytics on things including number of words per post, average words per post (by player), average number of posts per day, average words per day...that sort of thing. I didn't do it to make it into a contest for the players, but rather just as a curiosity. I did this by copying my cleaned text into Google Sheets.

To get the script working, you'd need to know a little bit of Javascript to update it for your campaign. Plus, it's really terrible code since I barely know what I'm doing. I'd be willing to share the code if someone wanted to take a crack at making something better.

Regarding OOC, I elected to dump all of it and also dumped all the rolls, adding narrative comments within the post to fill in the blanks. But I do that manually, after the script has the first pass at cleaning stuff up.

Airickson, that's cool that you did it in Google Docs! I wrote a Java program that scrapes the individual html files that make up each page of a thread and combines them into a single offline resource. But, I had to manually download each page. This was fine when I was downloading as I go, but would suck to do after the fact. I never got far enough to learn how to let the program login with my user credentials and just point it to a game and say "download that one." Here is a sample of the output of the program.

That looks really sharp! I agree, going back through over 3,000 posts and over 350,000 words and dumping them into the "cleaner" took a long time. But now that I'm up to date, it won't be so bad adding to the pile. I've divided our adventure into chapters, so I'm gradually going through each chapter (which is an individual Google Doc) and writing a summary as well as cleaning up grammar and ensuring everything makes sense after I've removed OOC comments and dice rolls. The front page of each of these chapter documents includes the statistics for that chapter and the summary. The subsequent pages are the cleaned posts.

Here's an example (published as a webpage)

These examples look great! Are your workarounds something that you could share with other users?

Best I could find was a 'print to PDF' that outputs like this, but messes up some of the shorter posts:

If someone could help me put together a simple HTML for a single page view, printable, I could implement the feature. I could also export as XML/JSON if people want that. But for the printable, it's mostly a matter of time to build the HTML.

My homemade workaround, to get all the posts in one page for printing, was to search for "." (using Adam's awesome extension). As in each post there is at least one full stop, this search returns all the posts. Then I selected them and printed selection as PDF.
Not great, but functional...