In the prior incarnation of the discussion boards, each page was a standalone HTML page rendered by the server. Activity on a board could be sorted by author, making it possible for an industrious person to write a script to generate a list of recent activity by their name, parse that list for message_id then iteratively fetch each post and save it locally as an archive.
The new discussion board design uses a single-page app design where the list of post activity isn’t rendered statically in the outer post but fetched within the page. This makes older “screen scrape” approaches useless.
The new board engine includes an archive utility that lets a user request an archive of all of their activity to be extracted, zipped and made available as a download. The process works very quickly but has a crucial flaw. The exported post content is saved in a CSV formatted flat file. That CSV format is incompatible with the HTML metadata within the post content, rendering the resulting CSV text file useless as a format for saving post content without a lot of extra work.
Is there any way this archive utility could just create individual flat files with the raw HTML of each post with a filename scheme based on message_id that ensures each file is distinct?
WTH