Export my contents, posts and topics to external blogging or social media platform

[hameedacpa]

my subject is about adding feature for all board members enabling them exporting their contents, posts and topics to any external blogging or social media platform like facebook or linkedin or  tumblr or blogspot

why we need this option to be available in IP? the answer here coming from the story of the website maktoob.com which will be closed in the next 15 Dec. 2014 .

maktoob.com is a website acquired by yahoo and it is consists of a lot of Arabic famous forums everyone reserving subdomain of maktoob.com and it has a millions of members and millions of posts and topics, and this website maktoob.com based on vbulletin forums 

 

for the users now a days I think they are in need of putting their posts in a website that having a going concern concept and for us as a webmasters we will be happy to tell our users that they can share their posts completely to facebook or to linkedin pulse or any platform

I hope somebody from IP can understand the risks that we are facing as a webmasters and the risks that we are facing as users and the most important risk here is making the user able to save his posts in any platform he like by sharing it

 

thanks alot to IP team

 

[The Jimmo]

You can share the page that your post is on and it is very easy to add a quick mod to share individual posts (I custom coded one for my site). As far as taking this content (data in any case) and pushing it and publishing it on social media or another site, I don't understand why you would want this. From a user perspective, if I would want my content from one site on another site I see that as my responsibility as it should be as the owner of this content who decides where this goes (many people on my forum belong to many car forums and usually copy/paste their posts from one to another. Myself nor them, expect some integration between all of this.). As a site owner, if my site were closing and users wanted their content, I could out of the kindness of my heart, an export could be done at that point to direct download of text files or some sort. Most users on popular websites have 1,000's upon 1,000's of posts/blogs/images/etc.., this is quite a demanding task to export all this without a "special need".

I am not part of the IPS team but this seems like a very, very unique request and might be something you could request/hire a 3rd party developer to help you with.

[hameedacpa]

You can share the page that your post is on and it is very easy to add a quick mod to share individual posts (I custom coded one for my site).

 can I ask you how you added a quick mod to share individual posts ?

[opentype]

The only thing IPS could do would be a general “structured data” export, like XML files and a folder with uploaded images. How someone would get that into other software is a different story altogether.

Every system has very different APIs and ways to upload content. Some wouldn’t allow such an import at all. IPS can’t maintain dozens of connections to all sorts of platforms just because someone might someday close an IPS site down and then wants to let users upload their stuff elsewhere. That case can happen, but then it’s up to the owners of that site to decide where the data should go exactly and find or develop a script that is tailored to that specific conversion. But there is no “Forum & Social Media Data Exchange Standard” which IPS could just support. 

[opentype]

Or to put it in a different way: You are asking the wrong company. If you think, for example, that content from an IPS site should be reusable on Facebook, you need to suggest this to Facebook and let them provide the necessary importer scripts. It is them who have to gain something (new users and new content) and they can make it happen technically. 

[The Jimmo]

 can I ask you how you added a quick mod to share individual posts ?

​Use the anchor of post id as the link the URL of the share button and then we placed that directly below the post. We didn't export any data like you wanted but it's a direct path or "share" to the post/comment.

[hameedacpa]

thank you all for the reply but if I'm a user and if I have a 2000 posts in a site it will be close in the next month and not belong to me, it will not be practical way to download each page include my posts

I need the user to find different ways for this issue to make him able to download his posts in a single step in any format accepted by any other platform , this is the idea here , also it can be an option to make the user able to publish his complete posts in a single step in his Facebook wall for example or in his LinkedIn plus eg..

simply if the forum that I'm opening is only for sharing the posts or topics that I'm writing , then no issue will arise , but the problem here the visitors get more experience than before and now they are realizing that putting some knowledge in any website that not belong to them will not guarantee that this knowledge will not be lost, that is why now a days they prefer to use Facebook or Google plus or LinkedIn for the professionals to publish what they know and share it with the internet visitors

the solution here is to give the user more options to backup his posts and more ability to publish it to the famous social media platform so we can convince the internet visitors to share their knowledge without fear because they will be able to keep it as it is in other platforms

Really the strategy of the IP forums must be changed because the world is moving and any user can open his own content within 10 minutes in any famous platform that is why IP Team must adopt " put your posts IP board and it will be available any time you need it within one click "

very thanks to you all

[The Jimmo]

Again there are a lot of issues with what you are proposing. I'll try to extract them below:

thank you all for the reply but if I'm a user and if I have a 2000 posts in a site it will be close in the next month and not belong to me, it will not be practical way to download each page include my posts

​#1 issue with this is that the forum owner would have to support this and allow it. There is no guarantee anywhere on any internet service, including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.. that states they HAVE to provide a way for you to get your content or that it will always be available. Granted, I know Facebook allows you to download your profile but that came 10+ years after they were an "it" thing and they have plenty of developers above and beyond the resources of IPS (not knocking IPS, I think they are tip top programmers ) and they play in a very different market than IPS.

I need the user to find different ways for this issue to make him able to download his posts in a single step in any format accepted by any other platform , this is the idea here , also it can be an option to make the user able to publish his complete posts in a single step in his Facebook wall for example or in his LinkedIn plus eg..

​This is an issue right here. There is no uniform way to post or gather data for all of this social networks for a user to easily upload to all. Like @opentype suggested too as this is very backwards approach to content design. The best you could do is output of straight data (no formatting) or some XML/JSON export.

simply if the forum that I'm opening is only for sharing the posts or topics that I'm writing , then no issue will arise , but the problem here the visitors get more experience than before and now they are realizing that putting some knowledge in any website that not belong to them will not guarantee that this knowledge will not be lost, that is why now a days they prefer to use Facebook or Google plus or LinkedIn for the professionals to publish what they know and share it with the internet visitors

 

Usually a forum is for multiple people discussing things so I doubt that will be your goal  . I've never in my many years of being a part of, help running and owning forums have ever had an individual come forth with this concern. Usually the reason why an individual WANTS to share their knowledge is to benefit the forum and members as a whole so they really aren't concerned too much about losing their content as it was created uniquely for your forum. Granted there are unique cases but as a whole I think this is a very, very unique idea that currently no forum/community software to my knowledge provides an out-of-the-box solution for. Like I said before, if this is a NEED for you, you will need to get it custom done for you.

the solution here is to give the user more options to backup his posts and more ability to publish it to the famous social media platform so we can convince the internet visitors to share their knowledge without fear because they will be able to keep it as it is in other platforms

Really the strategy of the IP forums must be changed because the world is moving and any user can open his own content within 10 minutes in any famous platform that is why IP Team must adopt " put your posts IP board and it will be available any time you need it within one click "

While yes, anyone can go to another platform very easily to write their content. The reason they go to YOUR forum/blog/whatever and NOT Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn to begin with is to be a part of YOUR community, write beneficial articles/posts/etc.. for your members. 

[hameedacpa]

Before continue more in this discussion , are there anybody from IPB reading this topics and taking care about it in their designing discussion ?

[The Jimmo]

Just because they aren't responding doesn't mean they aren't reading  

[IH_Jimbo]

You can already use RSS to integrate your forum with facebook.

[The Jimmo]

You can already use RSS to integrate your forum with facebook.

​You can't use it to aggregate and receive a single user's content though, that I'm aware of. That' what he wants.

[Farcaster II]

I really quite like the idea of an user rss feed.

Similar to the activity stream, but in rss/xml/json/whatever format

[hameedacpa]

Just because they aren't responding doesn't mean they aren't reading  

​Thank you Mr. ForeverPontiac , but I want to know if the IPB team following those suggestions  topics or not because I don't want to waste my time and your time too.

[Makoto]

I really quite like the idea of an user rss feed.

Similar to the activity stream, but in rss/xml/json/whatever format

​That sounds like a nice idea. I think it would just need to be something that's only usable with members that allow followers.

(Or maybe an RSS feed for the members you follow that just has some unique API key in the URL, that's possibly pushing it a bit though.)

[Lindy]

With Facebook, it's fair to say, the content you post is yours. It's by you, for you and about you. In a community setting, you're merely contributing content to and for others. It's not your content per se - it belongs to the community (and if you want to get technical, the site owner's) - this is spelled out in the Terms of Service, unless the admin specifically removes it. I could possibly understand blog content, but topic and shared community content is not really yours, regardless if you started the topic or not. If we were to export ONLY your posts, it would make for silly reading out of context without the surrounding content. We can't export content that doesn't belong to you in any way, shape or form without the site owner's authorization and frankly, I don't know why they would give it - but some might. 

Nonetheless, I can't say there's no use for this, but certainly not one that would prompt this to be built into the software. 

 

[hameedacpa]

With Facebook, it's fair to say, the content you post is yours. It's by you, for you and about you. In a community setting, you're merely contributing content to and for others. It's not your content per se - it belongs to the community (and if you want to get technical, the site owner's) - this is spelled out in the Terms of Service, unless the admin specifically removes it. I could possibly understand blog content, but topic and shared community content is not really yours, regardless if you started the topic or not. If we were to export ONLY your posts, it would make for silly reading out of context without the surrounding content. We can't export content that doesn't belong to you in any way, shape or form without the site owner's authorization and frankly, I don't know why they would give it - but some might. 

Nonetheless, I can't say there's no use for this, but certainly not one that would prompt this to be built into the software. 

 

​Thank you Mr. Lindy for your clear reply and let me discuss with you the above

first of all it is not correct that any reply of any user will be belong to the community and I know that this might be controlled by the terms and conditions but if I'll say that everything you will share in my community belong to the community this means nobody will come to my website and simply I have alot of stories like this and alot of users opened their own blogs in blogspot or in facebook and share their content and by the way they are very happy for this because nobody like me jumping in their shoulders

the strategy or the base you described above is not suitable for this age because simply we are facing alot of competition and alot of users sharing their contents now a days using facebook groups or facebook pages or any other platform and the way to slow down this or to keep the communities using ready made boards like IPB is to ensure to the end users that what they are going to share will be belong to them and they can get a copy of it anytime they need 

Vbulletin using good technique for this by making the user able to share the full content of their posts in facebook wall and this is very good idea that the user can write the post and find it as it is ( regardless the attachments) in his facebook wall

another idea that I suggest is to make the user able to download his own posts as a text or pdf and then the user will be free to copy and past his posts anywhere he like

finally the idea of making the users posts not belonging to him and belong to the community will be a disaster idea for all the users and admins too and believe me the users will hesitate to participate their knowledge specially if their knowledge is precocious and scientific

I hope the management of IPB change their vision because the competition and this is the time to make something very attractive to the users to come to our communities without fear of losing what they are going to share with us

 

very thanks to you and I hope this discussion will be moved to the internal team of IPB and i'm sure that they can understand the importance of making the users contributions available for them to use it anywhere they like and anytime they need

best regards

[Makoto]

If this is something you really want I'm sure you would have no problem hiring a developer to create a hook that accomplishes this for you. However, I don't think this is something that 99% of clients would care about or even a feature they'd want their members to have access to.

Just because Facebook offers this feature doesn't mean that IP.Board needs to as well. It makes more sense with Facebook.

I don't really think it's sensible to just dump random posts from random threads and I'm not really sure how this would be significantly useful to your members, if they're making posts that they want to keep backed up they should really be saving/categorizing them locally themselves as they make them (this is what I do for all the guides I post here, for example). But if this is a feature you really want, it could certainly be done with a plugin modification.

Posts aside, though you didn't mention this yourself I do think this makes more sense as a feature to offer for private conversations. You used to be able to have archives of conversations e-mailed to you, but I think this feature was removed. I might make a plugin to add that functionality back myself. To be fair I think I've only used this once, so I'm neutral on it being removed like most things, but I thought it was nice to have there and it makes a lot more sense that a user might to want to have archives of a private conversation sent to them.

[hameedacpa]

I don't know guys but it seems that most of websites owners here dealing with their communities like they are dealing with Joomla CMS  not a community software to share knowledge

there is very clear fact here we have to deal with it, the users contributions should be belong to them , they are free to copy it all or archive it all anytime anywhere , this is their right and if we will not deal with this situation in this way I can say that within a period of 5 to 10 years nobody will share knowledge in a private community not belong to a stable corporation

My community is about the science of accounting and auditing it contain 194,000 members and more than 140,000 posts and I started it in 2006 and really the trend the last three years is going down because most of the users the last three years moved to or prefer Facebook and yes they are registering in my community everyday but sharing the knowledge not like 2006,07,08,09,10 ,

I wrote what I wrote here because the last week it surprised me to hear that one of the biggest communities acquired by Yahoo include millions of posts and members going to close and they advised  the members to move their posts to Tumblr , actually I put myself in the position of those users who contribute in the communities thousands of posts and spent alot of time and alot of efforts that make the communities popular over the last 8 years and suddenly everything will be steamed out, of course I will feel like somebody stole something from me 

the rules in a community should not be same like the blogs or cms and again this is the right of the users. and if you didn't hear about this feature in any community system this means we are talking about something will make IPB unique comparing to the other communities systems 

 

[opentype]

I don't know guys but it seems that most of websites owners here dealing with their communities like they are dealing with Joomla CMS  not a community software to share knowledge

Come on, just because we don’t agree with you doesn’t mean we are not able to get what you want.

It’s just that we think, your request doesn’t really sound reasonable or technically feasible. 

The fact is: if you wan’t to let users download or export data from your IPS site, then this IS possible. Nothing is hidden or encrypted. It’s just regular data in a database which is shown through HTML pages. 

But like I said before: there is no standard way to get all user data out nor in to dozens of platforms. IPS was build around a forum system. Forum threads cannot be exported to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn anyway. It’s just not compatible. It can be exported to other forum software systems and THEY provide the importers for that. That’s already the case. Apart from the forums, content can be in personal messages, IP.Content, IP.Blogs, IP.Gallery even IP.Chat. There is no way to connect all that to all other network site. I don’t know how you imagine that to work. 

If you really need that now or when you sometime in the future close your site, it can easily be solved through very little custom coding. If your users use IP.Blogs for example, it takes one hour to write a script for a button that exports the user’s blog in an SQL or XML file or whatever is useful to the SPECIFIC use for your case. But that’s the point: you need to be much more specific about that. Getting all the data from an IPS suite out to all the other networks and software tools out there just doesn’t work. Not because IPS doesn’t want to, but because it just doesn’t work technically. 

[hameedacpa]

Come on, just because we don’t agree with you doesn’t mean we are not able to get what you want.

It’s just that we think, your request doesn’t really sound reasonable or technically feasible. 

The fact is: if you wan’t to let users download or export data from your IPS site, then this IS possible. Nothing is hidden or encrypted. It’s just regular data in a database which is shown through HTML pages. 

But like I said before: there is no standard way to get all user data out nor in to dozens of platforms. IPS was build around a forum system. Forum threads cannot be exported to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn anyway. It’s just not compatible. It can be exported to other forum software systems and THEY provide the importers for that. That’s already the case. Apart from the forums, content can be in personal messages, IP.Content, IP.Blogs, IP.Gallery even IP.Chat. There is no way to connect all that to all other network site. I don’t know how you imagine that to work. 

If you really need that now or when you sometime in the future close your site, it can easily be solved through very little custom coding. If your users use IP.Blogs for example, it takes one hour to write a script for a button that exports the user’s blog in an SQL or XML file or whatever is useful to the SPECIFIC use for your case. But that’s the point: you need to be much more specific about that. Getting all the data from an IPS suite out to all the other networks and software tools out there just doesn’t work. Not because IPS doesn’t want to, but because it just doesn’t work technically. 

​thank you Mr. opentype

first thing : i still emphasize that my suggestion here mainly about the forum software not a blog as you mentioned

second thing : if the strategy here is to deal with any topic as it is belong to the community which I consider it as a fuzzy strategy from the users prospective I suggest IPB to delete the option of upgrading the topics to articles because there is no anybody will contribute any valuable content in a website that not having a clear ways to download those topics or articles specially if it thousands , and me as a webmaster will not tell those who have thousands of topics to go through each topic and download it page by page or topic by topic

Finally : I'm sharing my thoughts here not as a website admin,but as a user,  and I think the management consider this side in all the stages of the software development that is why I thought that it might help them to make tiny option in the user profile to download their contributions in txt or pdf format or share it completely to the famous social media like facebook

any way  this is my thoughts and this is the experiment of  www.maktoob.com and the wise management always consider the history when they are developing or planning for the future.

best regards to you all

[The Jimmo]

second thing : if the strategy here is to deal with any topic as it is belong to the community which I consider it as a fuzzy strategy from the users prospective I suggest IPB to delete the option of upgrading the topics to articles because there is no anybody will contribute any valuable content in a website that not having a clear ways to download those topics or articles specially if it thousands , and me as a webmaster will not tell those who have thousands of topics to go through each topic and download it page by page or topic by topic

 

This is a very heavily opinionated statement. People have shown for the past 10+ years of online forums existence that they are willing to provide content with no guarantee that they can download it or use it again so long as they can help/discuss/share with those in the community. People have FLOODED social media with no guarantee that they can download the pictures, posts, links, etc.. that they share. I just do not see any need or requirement in my nearly 20 years in the business that says IPS has to do this or that this is a necessity moving forward (you're actually the first person ever I've seen requesting this).

I agree 100% with @opentype that it isn't really feasible either from the tech side exactly as you want it.

Like I said from the beginning if you REQUIRE this to be a part of your forum you can get a developer to add a download option to export some items. Still as a user of that forum, I would wonder why do I have this option? Do they not expect to be around long-term? Is their data not secured/backed up that they need me to do it?

[hameedacpa]

I agree 100% with @opentype that it isn't really feasible either from the tech side exactly as you want it.

Mr. ForeverPontiac , what is the standards you are depending on to give a judge about this option being feasible or not !!!, actually I find this answer is very strange and very biased because there is no any objective opinion in this regards till now about why we don't want this option to be exist?. The reason I got from you is " it isn't feasible " which I consider it no reason

for the management of IPS I hope they can do a periodic survey to study the need of the new suggested options and not depending on such a none scientific responses and again what I ask is not that option that I'll hire a developer for and it should be in the admin control panel one option to make this feature available to the users in their profile , if it is activated then the user will find one link make him able to download all the posts he wrote as html or txt or pdf or any format , if the IPS want more attractive options to the users then they can make more integration with Facebook to make the user able to publish all the posts complete contents or synchronizing his posts complete contents with his Facebook wall

​very simple and very attractive and our users will like it and will appreciate it and they will feel that their contributions is located in a safe website and of course this will encourage them to increase the response rate and increase the traffic in the website too . isn't it ?

best regards to you all

[The Jimmo]

Mr. ForeverPontiac , what is the standards you are depending on to give a judge about this option being feasible or not !!!, actually I find this answer is very strange and very biased because there is no any objective opinion in this regards till now about why we don't want this option to be exist?. The reason I got from you is " it isn't feasible " which I consider it no reason

for the management of IPS I hope they can do a periodic survey to study the need of the new suggested options and not depending on such a none scientific responses and again what I ask is not that option that I'll hire a developer for and it should be in the admin control panel one option to make this feature available to the users in their profile , if it is activated then the user will find one link make him able to download all the posts he wrote as html or txt or pdf or any format , if the IPS want more attractive options to the users then they can make more integration with Facebook to make the user able to publish all the posts complete contents or synchronizing his posts complete contents with his Facebook wall

​very simple and very attractive and our users will like it and will appreciate it and they will feel that their contributions is located in a safe website and of course this will encourage them to increase the response rate and increase the traffic in the website too . isn't it ?

best regards to you all

​Believe you need to read ALL of opentype's response and my response again.  I can't speak for opentype but I have nearly 20 years web/software development experience, running very successful websites and a Masters degree in Software Engineering. Exporting to multiple social media sites is not really advisable from a technical perspective or from a user perspective honestly wanted (if you have nearly over 2,000 posts, who wants that hitting their social "feed" at one time? Especially if it's garbage like "I agree with Bob"). If you further read, exporting to XML, JSON, or some form of structured data of a database we both stated is certainly possible but even at that point I only see value in very specific posts. Which honestly as a user, I can copy/backup, whatever you want to call it, on my own by copy/paste into a Word doc. 

I still fail to see the value in this from a user perspective that makes me want to develop this or support IPS' involvement from an owner perspective. Now if there was an uproar in the IPS community behind you, I would definitely lie down in defeat but from other's responses it doesn't look like that so again, I think your best suitable option is to hire a 3rd party developer for your very specific need and then come back to IPS with the success and data behind how your users use it. Maybe sell it as a third-party add-on and see how well it is adapted by other admins too. Right now, I remain really, really skeptical of the idea.