Subj : YahooGroups
To   : All
From : Beery
Date : Mon Feb 19 2018 07:13:43

Hey,

Though I would post this out there if anyone can make use of it.  If you have
an area that used to or still is on YahooGroups, I have a way to bring those
messages in the Mystic BBS software.

The first thing one has to do is run PG Offline to dump all the messages from
the group.  I've dumped two groups; one with ~1800 messages and the other
with approximately 85,000 messages.

After the messages are dumped, you have to use PG Offline to Export those
messages to a pipe delimted text file.

At this point, you can then import the text file into Microsoft Excel with
the pipe delimter.

From there, you need to do just a bit of cleanup.  I had < 1% of the messages
that were very heavy into HTML and had to be deleted as it screwed up the
layout of one message per line.  Using the sort routine identified those
messages very easily allowing a mass delete of the bad messages.  Then, I
resorted back in numerical order.

I wrote some VBA code that is launched by a button.  At this point, it writes
a INI file out to be used by Mystic BBS's MUTIL program.  A second series of
files are written out to a directory containing the filenumber.txt file.

I then go back and edit the INI file and place the appropriate INI
instructions for MUTIL at the top of the file and save it.

Then, simply running MUTIL  filename.ini starts bringing in those messages
into an area one has setup.

Now, I am not suggesting these messages be dumped into the echomail areas in
Retro.  Rather, dumped into a separate message base you create from your
BBS system.

When you start the MUTIL program, it is going to take time.  Small dumps of <
2000 messages are quick.  For my 85,000 messages, the first 32,000 messages
were about 12 hours.  I'm now on part 2 of 3 of that segment.

Yes, it is a bit of work, but it does allow the preservation of some
historical content.

If anyone is interested in the file, it is available on my BBS as
MysticExport.xlsm.  My BBS is 9640News.ddns.net port 9640.

Beery

--Beery Miller -- 9640 News BBS -- 9640news.ddns.net:9640 --

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A38 2018/01/01 (Windows/64)
 * Origin: 9640 News BBS (80:774/27)

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