Archiving Topics by Printing to PDF

[KT Walrus]

For a new community I am working on, topics will be deleted after 90 days (for keeping a lid on my long term hosting costs).

I want to give my users a way to archive selected topics to their local devices.

The best way I have figured out for them to do this is to print the topic to a PDF.

But, currently, printing a topic results in an ugly PDF and for topics with more than 1 page of replies is very cumbersome (as you have to print each page separately.

So, can you:

1. Fix printing CSS.
2. Add a Print option for a topic post or a reply in the '...' menu.

The Print menu item should give the option of "including all replies" or "only print the specific post". Submitting this form should take you to a page that only contains the posts formatted for printing (including conditional page breaks between replies near the bottom of a page). No board headers/footers and all the other unnecessary cruft. The user can then Print to PDF this page to save the topic to a local file.

Here is a mangled looking first page done using Chrome on my Mac:

 

[Luuuk]

19 hours ago, KT Walrus said:

No board headers/footers and all the other unnecessary cruft.

Perhaps this may be helpful:

 

[Ghost Face]

19 hours ago, KT Walrus said:

For a new community I am working on, topics will be deleted after 90 days (for keeping a lid on my long term hosting costs).

I can't imagine that hosting costs are an issue for a new community. Unless you're literally storing hundred-thousands if not millions of posts, hosting shouldn't be expensive at all. I'm pretty sure that you can host a small community on an optimized VPS for max $10-15 a month.

[Charles]

We do not charge anything for database storage on our platform.

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Ghost Face said:

I can't imagine that hosting costs are an issue for a new community. Unless you're literally storing hundred-thousands if not millions of posts, hosting shouldn't be expensive at all. I'm pretty sure that you can host a small community on an optimized VPS for max $10-15 a month.

My site has just shy of 2M posts from over 20 years.  The post table contains 1.9G worth of data.  Basically for every million posts, it is about 1GB of database space for the post table itself.  The entire database is 6.5GB...  including the conversion mappings for Xenforo -> IPB, keeping a permanent edit log, IP log, etc.  

Another site has similar metrics in terms of post to storage ratio.  

 Now... attachments, avatars, etc are a whole different story. 😄 

Edited March 3, 2022 by Randy Calvert

[Ghost Face]

13 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

My site has just shy of 2M posts from over 20 years.  The post table contains 1.9G worth of data.  Basically for every million posts, it is about 1GB of database space for the post table itself.  The entire database is 6.5GB...  including the conversion mappings for Xenforo -> IPB, keeping a permanent edit log, IP log, etc.  

Another site has similar metrics in terms of post to storage ratio.  

 Now... attachments, avatars, etc are a whole different story. 😄 

That's interesting to know, thanks for that! 

I have a site running on another software and I know how massive it can get when you keep all the logs permanently. 💀

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Ghost Face said:

That's interesting to know, thanks for that! 

I have a site running on another software and I know how massive it can get when you keep all the logs permanently. 💀

I generally keep all software logged things like IP address, last edit history, etc forever.  As you can see... it's not a lot of storage space for those sorts of things.  Even most shared hosting services would not have a problem storing the database.   😄  

Now...  Apache and server level logs can get MUUUUUCH bigger.  Those I don't keep beyond a few weeks.  

[KT Walrus]

Respectfully, my post was not about my decision to remove posts/attachments after 90 days. I want IPS to fix printing of complete topics (including all replies) to PDF and have the resulting document look like a paper version of the topic, not like a webpage (mangled as it current is).

If this is implemented, I can tell my users to archive any topics they want to keep locally by printing to PDF. This is a good solution to a common problem I have with using this software.

Another solution would be to add an "Archive to PDF" feature available on the topic view page, but I think it would be too much work to generate PDF when it is easy to generate an HTML page and let the browser's Print/Export to PDF feature to handle archiving the document locally.

I'm a Mac user, and Safari has a Reader View feature for webpages. This Reader View is very convenient for printing the content only of a webpage (just change to Reader View and Print to PDF). Unfortunately, the default theme here doesn't support Reader View for topics.

Support for Reader View in the default Theme is another feature I plan on posting a Feature Request for sometime. I just haven't done so yet, but it would also make my new site even more usable.