Is it possible to download every post I have made? Along with the OP, for context?

[OAITW r.2.0]

I imagine that would be both a coding chore and extra-processing time, but I see a huge benefit to the Admins and the DU community,

Here's the pitch. I'd really like to leave my DU legacy available to my son and daughter. My sibs/subsibs as well.

Could DU code and dump a complete file of all of my posts since I signed up as Old and In the Way back in 2002? I'd pay serious money for that information.

In some ways, my communications on DU were more honest and probing then my convo's with the extended family over the past few decades.

Those that might care could use AI to extract any meaningful comment I might have accidentally made.

[The Roux Comes First]

1. I Have That Same Question for the Tens of Thousands

Of emails over the years!

I have been growing to accept that those are not necessarily legacies easy to establish. But then, from conversations with my antique-dealer BFF, he has found that his kids relegate multi-thousand-dollar pieces of gifted furniture to the basement. It might be worth feeling out your potential audience!

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. Maybe 10 years in the future, my kids could sit around and ask their computer...."did Dad say anything about this?"

Never considered the point that I've made @ 100,000 posts since 2002 and it could be delivered to my kids as my thoughts that I may never have verbally expressed.

[Beartracks]

3. There could be an Alexa-type device that speaks in your voice...

... and they could ask it questions. "Hey Dad... Did you ever say anything about Florida's don't-say-gay bill?"

============

[OAITW r.2.0]

4. Fucking wild, but totally on the horizon.

So, 2 things need to be addressed.

(1) Could DU sell the comments made on site?
(2) Is it possible to create a complete dataset of all comments a DU user has made?

I think both are a yes, but I hope consideration would be to sell the data back to the users.

[usonian]

5. I have been trying to save to pdf, my more serious posts.

The history only goes so far back. Bookmarks have not run out for me (yet) but only OP's can be bookmarked.

Quite simply, I find search of my local pdf files faster than either DU site search, which often times out.

Google does crawl the site, so everything is probably findable, but their ranking is dubious IMO.

[OAITW r.2.0]

6. I know, there's no good way of collecting everything you have posted.

But DU could do this. At a cost. I think they could write the code and then do the dump for any user that is willing to pay for it. I would.

[usonian]

7. We should request.

The history only goes so far back, but if it's done at all, it could easily be extended.

So, imagine a long html file of links to all your posts ( not paginated, thank you ) if we promise not to dump all of them with a script ( as with curl or wget) at once, even with a delay between accesses)

I have auto-pager browser extensions, but they don't always work. Lately, they never work.

That would be the simplest to implement ( just extending code already there ) and a tiny extra load on the servers to transmit a long file of links.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Put posts into your journal that you really want to leave as legacy . . . . nt

[EarlG]

9. "Is it possible" is an interesting question...

Everything you've posted on DU is stored in the database and is attached to your username, so the answer to "is it possible" is technically yes. However, I don't know how easy it would be to process that information into a useable form (this is Elad's area of expertise). In your case you'd be talking about creating a document containing tens of thousands of posts (or tens of thousands of individual documents), and I don't know how much tinkering would be required to make something like that happen in an efficient way.

So this is certainly an interesting idea but I don't know how much work would be required to make it happen -- I'll address it with Elad to at least find out if it's something that might be worth looking into.