Being able to download all my content from the board - not delete it - download to my computer

I think there should be a feature like many other forums are implementing, as well as social media like Facebook, Google, etc, where users can download all their contributions to the site.

What I'm interested doing is being able to download any thread to which I contributed, so if I respond to a posting within a thread, that thread gets flagged (maybe simply as "contribution") and then if I start a thread, then it gets marked something like "originator" "OP".

This should be very easy to sort the threads by forum and by date (both actually), so people can search their own postings by the date they were posted (ideally be able to list all posts, so if you reply 10 times in one thread over 4 months, then those would be listed in order by date - and the rest of the content of the thread also saved with the data).

Now as far as what is able to be downloaded, the entire thread to which you contribute. If the thread has 20 posts and one of those is yours, then that entire thread (with the 19 replies) would be included - it wouldn't' just include your single reply. The same would be done for threads the member starts.

The content the member contributes should be able to be downloaded, maybe in a zip, rar, bzip or tar file (or some other method to place all threads into a container file and compress them for transfer)

It would be great if the data could be transferred to your Google drive, Icloud and any other web based service, by using a URL provided by ATS that will allow the user to copy the data using your ATS login info. Another option would be via SFTP (secure FTP) which could be set up using the members current login info or there could be a process to setup a unique password (and username maybe???) for that function alone. The good part about logging in with Google+ is that it is already authenticated and copying to Gdrive should be very simple. IDK if Facebook allows the same type of thing, but if it does, that's an option as well.

If the company doesn't like this idea or thinks it's going to be too much work, I think they are going to find themselves legally required to do this as per EU regulations either very soon or within a year or so. Once that happens, users from the states, Australia and elsewhere would be able piggy back off of these laws by using proxy servers and claiming to be residing within the EU, and fighting that would be very costly and nearly impossible to prove from ATS's standpoint. Every time we've seen privacy and data rights legislation enacted in the EU, it's always been near impossible for the company to not implement a global policy that matches the EU regulations (unless they decide to ban all EU members and remove all of their past content), which would be prohibitively expensive and would destroy the board.

So how many of you would like to be able to download a compilation of the work you put in on this board? Do you believe you are entitled to your work and the actual owner?

Does ATS believe they are the owner of what you write and publish on the board and if so, are you willing to fight this in Brussels?

How about the EU just bans euros from accessing ATS since you know they want to change everything let them enforce it.

So first you like an option to download your content and the content you star.
Then it must become mandatory, because EU will make ATS and we're all going to prentend to be euro trash. Or nay screw em and be gone with em.

I keep most of my contributions private. Obvious reasons

Well the EU is making Facebook and Google and many other websites do the same thing. I'm not saying anything that isn't already in the works in the EU, and like it or not, they are a large market and contribute heavily to this board.

They could withdraw from the EU market if they don't want to follow the rules, just like Brexit. I'm just saying what I think would be a nice feature to have, since many people spend a lot of time contributing to the site, they should be able to have access to that data - basically exactly what they have said in the EU.

So if I'm "pretending to be eurotrash", that seems a rather inflamatory statement for simply asking to be able to access data I have created.

I think the EU ruled that sites like this are platforms and the members are the content creators and as such they are legally permitted to have access to their work in a reasonable fashion. That is why Facebook has "created" the "download all user content" option, which they claim has always been an option, though people never found it before this law was created.

The site doesn't have to follow the EU laws, but I think EU members can sue for not allowing it, I'm a little fuzzy on jurisdiction issues but sites run in the US have had to comply with EU laws before, because they host EU members or provide services in those countries.

Don't get mad at me for asking this, IDK where the hostility is coming from. The data is already there it is just very difficult to access, the same as it was for facebook and others.

Well, seeing as all that data is available within your account, you could learn a scripting language, scrape your profile, download and format everything and store it in a zip file.

It shouldn't be too hard. There's libraries available in most languages for parsing and formatting html.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

How many times are you going to ask this?

your content?


When you post it, its no longer your content, its ATSs

How about a message that this particular feature is unavailable in your country?

But seriously, the site is wonky enough with the queries hitting the database as it is. Doing unscheduled deep dives by multiple users at any moment is asking a bit much. Unlike Facebook, complete posting histories are not collated in a comprehensive timeline. That said, you have a history of your recent threads and recent posts. They are hotlinked and you can copy and paste. Or the alternative to copy and paste is to print pages as pdf files.

But given that pretty much the entire site has been indexed by Google searchbots, but not RATS, and that there is no particular search parameter that I can think of that would give an indexed history of all your posts in a single printable format. The above suggestions are your best bet.

How about you copy and paste your stuff in a file on your computer. Or even type it out and save it on your device THEN copy and paste it to ATS.

originally posted by: DigginFoTroof
So how many of you would like to be able to download a compilation of the work you put in on this board? Do you believe you are entitled to your work and the actual owner?

From what you wrote I got the idea you were talking about downloading everything, not just "your" work, in a 20 posts thread in which you had just made one post you would be downloading more work from others than you own.

Does ATS believe they are the owner of what you write and publish on the board and if so, are you willing to fight this in Brussels?

I'm not familiar with that legislation, could you point me the related EU directive or equivalent?

The Above Top Secret Web site is a wholly owned social content community of The Above Network, LLC. This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression. All content copyright 2019, The Above Network, LLC.

There is your answer... on every single page. Once you post it here, you are in effect "publishing it" through ATS, and giving ATS ownership of it.


Now if you want a physical copy, or digital copy, you can open up your posting history and print it as a .pdf

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

You're a very demanding individual.

Looking over the T&C’s, lots of things come into play here. I’ll post some highlights to consider and where they are located.

1) You agree that TAN will not be liable to you or any third party for any modification or discontinuance of the services.

So the request can be made for what you want, but no legal obligation to deliver on that feature request.

8) INDEMNIFICATION: You agree to protect and fully compensate the TAN Parties from any and all third-party claims, liability, damages, expenses and costs (including, but not limited to, reasonable attorneys' fees) arising from your use of the Websites, or violation of the Terms and Conditions of Use (or for members, the Additional Terms and Conditions of Membership) by you or any other user of your account (whether or not authorized), and you agree to indemnify and hold the TAN Parties harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Websites, your connection to the Websites, your violation of these terms and conditions, or your violation of the rights of another.

Any fine levied by the EU would be yours to pay. If it went that route.

12c) Choice of Law. These Terms and Conditions of Use (and for members, the Additional Terms and Conditions of Membership) shall be deemed to have been entered into in the State of Arizona. The rights of you and TAN hereunder shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the State of Arizona without regard to conflicts of laws principles. Each party to this Agreement irrevocably (a) submits to the exclusive jurisdiction of any state or federal court located in Maricopa County, Arizona in litigating any action or proceeding arising out of or relating to this Terms and Conditions of Use (and for members, the Additional Terms and Conditions of Membership), and (b) agrees that any such action or proceeding may be litigated only in such courts. TAN and you agree to waive, to the fullest extent permitted by law, the defenses of lack of personal jurisdiction, inconvenient forum, and improper venue to the maintenance of any such action or proceeding. Any final judgment rendered against a party in any such action or proceeding shall be conclusive as to the subject of such final judgment and may be enforced in other jurisdictions in any manner provided by law.

Choice of law has been made. The EU cannot supersede it without compensation once they visit the site, which would need to happen to confirm you had a case.

(Not numbered but is between 14) & 15) and is specific to full members and not just visitors)Your membership in the Websites indicates your acceptance of the above Terms and Conditions for Use as well as the following Additional Terms and Conditions of Membership. These terms and conditions are subject to change without warning, so please review them regularly.

17) Rights In Posted Materials: By posting on this message board, you relinquish all exclusive copyrights to any materials you Post and furthermore, you grant TAN non-exclusive, non-revocable worldwide, royalty-free rights to copy, distribute, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, create derivative works, and publicly perform the materials in perpetuity in all forms.

To sum it up, you post it, it is published by TAN and belongs to TAN with shared ownership to the author.

And finally, since copying material is the entire basis of the question at hand...

6) You will not copy, distribute, display, or publicly perform material from the Websites to Post on other websites or quote in offline research in a manner that does not comply with the Creative Commons License that specifies the author's member name as a member of AboveTopSecret.com, includes The Above Network, LLC and the member as owners of the content, provides the title of the thread, and a full URL to the board thread. 


Copying entire threads especially posts that are not yours may or may not violate the copyrights specified in 6) as it may or may not comply the specific Creative Commons License. Simple offline reading might not be a problem, but if at any point a profit is made then it would definitely violate the Creative Commons License.

Side note to the above. The ATS Radio Shows did not seek or accept advertisers and produced at our own expense because we used Creative Commons Licensed music and didn’t wish to enter a gray area even though some shows were very separated.

originally posted by: Groot
How about you copy and paste your stuff in a file on your computer. Or even type it out and save it on your device THEN copy and paste it to ATS.

Since the board started acting up I type everything in a text editor and then paste it onto the site, I've lost MANY posts b/c it stalled while being submitted and then hitting back or reload both lost the data.

I don't see the problem with suggesting things that would help the board, it is common practice on every other forum I've ever been on going back to BBS's in the early 90's. I've never see such hostility by some members for rational suggestions.

As to the server load, it wouldn't be much different than doing a query for a single user name. It could output a list of threads and filter for repeats and give you the option to save them as HTML/bookmark(s). From there people could probably use those to print out the entirety of the list as a PDF through their machine with standard PDF printer drivers.

Is there a way to make the page display longer (fit more replies per page)? That would be beneficial when printing 100 page threads.




I think part of my problem is navigating the board, it isn't very standardized, so I may have missed some features which would help the issue I'm talking about. Many times when I go through the menu options (My ATS and everything to the right on the bar, and all their sub-menu's), I often get timed out and frustrated and eventually leave. I just today found that there are 2 "subscription pages". There is one under the link of "My ATS" and then there is one that I never saw before and can't seem to get back to titles "your subscribed threads". ( I see it is under the down arrow button now) These two subscription pages have different lists.

Is there any place that lists all the threads the member created? Most boards you can do a search by a members name and then select "creator of thread", "commentor in thread" or both.

The problem is some theads are 100+ pages long and some people respond 100+ times in that thread, so search results like that make it impossible to do a search. If there was an option to limit results to "one link per thread" that would help

I just can't see how the board can't provide a list of every thread a member started and then a list of every thread they responded in. That would be a huge help and big start.

I would think the system could export/push the php (or whatever language it is in) from the thread into a PDF, even via a printer driver, and than allowing the entire content to be emailed to the member, sent to an FTP address or just an HTML/ftp download link for it. Then use a bulk downloader to get all the PDF's that the site created.

If server capacity is an issue, it could be prioritized at the back so when there is free processing power, it processes the request and when complete it informs the user. Once downloaded the user can select to delete it or it should be automatically deleted after X days after download (or if sat idle w/ no download for XX days).

a reply to: Ahabstar

Thanks for the info, I don't have time to read it today but it looks like it has a lot of info I'm looking for.

This is the legislation with which I'm most familiar:

en.wikipedia.org...

Regardless of what a couple members say (one is just a straight up troll) this really isn't an unerasonalbe request and is standard in almost every forum software I've admin'd or installed - so I thought it might have these features built in somewhere but were disabled.

One of the legislations I was talking about from the EU is the GDPR but there are 2-3 new pieces of legislation in the process of being written or introduced in Brussels. They basically state that no matter the TOC/TOS of the sites, the content generated by the individuals IS their property and they retain rights to such property and they can expect reasonable access to such material. It also makes sites like Facebook, Twitter and others liable for the content on thieir site, just like a news site - they would no longer be considered a "platform" and instead a publisher - and this carries over to smaller websites that consider themselves "platforms" (forums, groups, etc) and members and contributors retain the rights to their work regardless of the TOS/TOC.

I've seen a few video's about this but they were all in foreign languages, Polish, French, German Dutch, Italian and a few others (some were in the same video, interviewing rep's from diff countries). I do think Russia Today had a nice segment on this b/c it was going to effect a lot of their technical forums where people have uploaded technical diagrams and such and the site was using this data for their own gain (selling technical specs, schematics, blueprints, etc) and the new law would allow the member to recover compensation for information derived from these postings (with a run of the mill TOS/TOC - all published info is property of the site). So, IDK where it is in the process, if the 3 proposals are just variations or what. But i did get the feeling that it was going to effect every discussion site in the US, AUS, NZ and others and thought it might be bad news for some of them.

a reply to: ArMaP

Check out the above post, it also replies to what you asked.

originally posted by: Groot
How about you copy and paste your stuff in a file on your computer. Or even type it out and save it on your device THEN copy and paste it to ATS.

Thank you Groot....been composing from a processor to cut n paste for some years now...got everything off-site...on multiple storage drives.....

Never lose anything and I index them in thread, reply, date, size etc....

And you can look at any members threads and personal replies by clicking to their profiles....

ooooo that could be a fun Python parsing script I could work on...

hmmm...........

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

We can already click any member-profile and see all their threads and posts

a reply to: mysterioustranger

Well, not exactly. After much scrolling and loading, mine stopped in April 2018 on posts. Public threads are there, but there is not as many. Staff related threads are not listed (naturally). But from what I can remember, the public threads all seem to be there. More prolific thread staters might hit a limitation of the listing feature.