I wound up brushing this off a few years later. As I recall, I continued looking at this a bit in 2018, but ran into difficulties trying to restore ImageShack images that were never surmounted. It's also still a relatively manual process in part because it includes some manually written metadata (such as a short description) for each item, in part because some parts of the archive are still manually specified, and in part because uploading the web page remains nearly entirely manual.
After two years, the Photobucket archiving code needed to be updated. We actually aren't in quite as bad of shape as in 2018; instead of simply not showing any images, Photobucket now serves them, but watermarked. This still can distract significantly from the story, however. With the update to the code, the archived versions being created are once more creating Photobucket-restored, watermark-free archives.
And I've run it on and archived two threads, both succession games:
Who-5: Tom Tom Club builds a party lounge training game
Gma02: "First Come, First Severed" - Training Day Game
The former has a lot of Photobucket images, and a lot of them are still live in the CFC thread... but watermarked. The watermarks are exorcised from the archive. The latter has the opposite ratio, with only Photobucket images present; the rest were roughly split between being lost to the Great Hack of 2008, and to villagephotos.com going down roughly a decade ago, with a smattering on ImageShack. But some restoration is better than none.
I think to really sustain this endeavor, I'll need to automate some more of the process; currently it's a lot of overhead per thread, which is hard to justify given the relatively low demand. But it's still somewhat rewarding to see an improved, archived version of a thread successfully created.
Edit: Have also added story(ies):
Demi-God Madness II by Vind2
After two years, the Photobucket archiving code needed to be updated. We actually aren't in quite as bad of shape as in 2018; instead of simply not showing any images, Photobucket now serves them, but watermarked. This still can distract significantly from the story, however. With the update to the code, the archived versions being created are once more creating Photobucket-restored, watermark-free archives.
And I've run it on and archived two threads, both succession games:
Who-5: Tom Tom Club builds a party lounge training game
Gma02: "First Come, First Severed" - Training Day Game
The former has a lot of Photobucket images, and a lot of them are still live in the CFC thread... but watermarked. The watermarks are exorcised from the archive. The latter has the opposite ratio, with only Photobucket images present; the rest were roughly split between being lost to the Great Hack of 2008, and to villagephotos.com going down roughly a decade ago, with a smattering on ImageShack. But some restoration is better than none.
I think to really sustain this endeavor, I'll need to automate some more of the process; currently it's a lot of overhead per thread, which is hard to justify given the relatively low demand. But it's still somewhat rewarding to see an improved, archived version of a thread successfully created.
Edit: Have also added story(ies):
Demi-God Madness II by Vind2
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