For the most part a good effort but I really hate the way the reply textbox functions. It’s ok on mobile but on desktop, squeezed all the way the bottom of the screen – just awfully awkward.
Having a harder time seeing the difference between Artstation and CGSociety anymore.
could go here and give them a piece of your mind I guess:
“CG+ was built with a huge focus on delighting its users. The sleek dark design brings a touch of class to the application making CG+ a pleasure to use. Always. And of course, we haven’t skipped anything when it comes to great usability.”
Search doesn’t work, stats out of whack, but hey, it’s the ‘look’ that matters…
Admins… What the hell are you doing with this forum???
Travis
advanced search should be up and working sometime in Janaury. its being worked on now.
500 errors are being fixed as well thanks for listing what you are experiencing
will see
Since January 1st, I don’t receive notifications, nor emails either from posts I’m watching.
It would be good to have the possibility to download this whole forum, even in plain text.
In case anyone would like to try, here’s the CSV file with post count, views, thread link and date.
2003 – 2019 years
CGTalk_3ds_Max_SDK_and_MaxScript_2003-2019_CSV.zip (957.0 KB)
You can try this javascript snippet in your browser developer tools to parse any cgs forum section.
It first tries to scroll down to a maximum and then scroll back a little to force new threads loading event. Maybe you’ll need to tweak numbers for it to work on your pc.
var times = 0;
var scroller = setInterval(function() {
if ( times++ < 1000 )
{
window.scroll(0, window.scrollMaxY );
window.scroll(0, scrollY - 150 );
} else { clearInterval(scroller); console.log("finished!"); }
}, 300);
Thank you @Serejah for the threads list.
How would you then download each thread to a separated file having them use a common folder for the assets?
Even if we could crawl the whole forum, I don’t know the CGSociety policies about this.
I was thinking more on the idea of having a sort of indexed “digested mailing list” that CGSociety would provide us. A simple .TXT file per thread organized in folders, preferable with the “code” tags to make the parser’s work easier
This thread soon will become the longest one in whole mxs sdk section
(
page_crawl_posts_step = 15
-- foreach threadData in CSV do
-- sleep for a reasonable amount of time not to disturb cgs servers with lots of requests
url = @"https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/msx-editor-access/2049420"
thread_id = (tmp = FilterString url "/"; tmp[tmp.count])
savepath = @"C:\somefolder" + "/" + thread_id
postcount = 10
if not doesFileExist savepath do makeDir savepath
if postcount <= 20 then
(
dragAndDrop.DownloadUrlToDisk url (savepath + "/" + (thread_id as string) + ".html") 0
)
else
(
for i=1 to postcount by page_crawl_posts_step do
(
dragAndDrop.DownloadUrlToDisk (url + "/" + i as string) (savepath + "/" + (thread_id as string) + "-" + i as string + ".html") 0
)
)
)But it is just raw data not viewable in a browser. And also it seems like you can’t get more than 20 posts per request.
I’d also prefer to have entire thread in a separate file, but this is much more complicated since it will require either to combine several saved files in one pragmatically or use some headless browser to scroll-up-down each thread from top to bottom before saving it to disk.
Saving the content we did for personal use shouldn’t be forbidden I guess. Why would search engine web crawlers be allowed to do so?
it should be easier to take source html as:
wc = dotnetobject "System.Net.WebClient"
webData = wc.DownloadString "https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/autodesk-masterclass-video-2006/1257849/5"after that we need to convert it to xml for easier parsing
I used HtmlAgilityPack for offline mxs reference html parsing. It is pretty performant and easy to use