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Announcement Site Logistics New Year - Overdue Clean Up

Information provided by the Umbra Leadership Team regarding the site's activities.
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Rei

Rei

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Sunshine Gnomie Frog Queen's Blessing The Giving Apple Froggo First Light
Hi there everyone!

As we're moving into 2026, there's a number of things that I want to be able to bring to our site.

Part of this is a fresh base to help our server avoid being overloaded with content - We've worked to keep as much content as possible on our site. While it's been a pretty decent set up to now, I want to give some more space for future stories.

With that in mind - it's about time we do a clean up of our space - and this means that I am going to be clearing out content from from the site's founding to the beginning of 2025 - This means postings through December 31st 2024 at 11:59pm ET (I'm using ET as it is my time zone).

I'm going to do this on the first of February, so you have all of the month of January to find your things you want to save, export them, and keep the ones you want!

To Reiterate:

What is happening: Site content clean-up, Items deleted through December 31st, 2024. Public Threads with activity this year will not be touched. All direct messages from before 2025 will be cleared.

When is it happening: 2/1/2026
What you need to do: Save any pre 2025 content you want before the end of the month! Nothing else needs to be done! 🙂

You can do this easily with two major tools!

Conversation Exporting
At the top of your Conversation, you will see the button that says "export direct message". You can click that and enter '500' in the 'post limit' option provided (100 is the default). Once you click 'submit', a page will be formatted with 500 of your posts batched into one page.

View attachment 49155


Note the 500th item - you can then locate the page it is on, and start your next export from that page, and that 501st item will be the beginning of that page.

Thread Exporting
At the top of your thread, you will see three dots. Clicking on them will create a drop-down menu where 'export thread' is located at the bottom of the list. Similar to the conversation/dm space, you can specify pages, and number of posts per page.

Screenshot 2025-12-28 214140.pngScreenshot 2025-12-28 214235.png

These items can be saved by using the 'print' function on your computer. Ctrl-P, or right click and select it in the dropdown.
Change the 'Printer' dropdown to reflect 'PDF', and you can save the item as a text PDF for your computer

Screenshot 2025-12-28 214326.pngScreenshot 2025-12-28 214439.png


If you have any questions, feel free to pop them in here!
 
Last edited:
I will back up all information before deleting in case of emergencies, but this is all content posted before that date - it is a per-item removal, so it will be any posts made before 2025 - threads will remain, but I am aiming to clear out all spaces on site (as DMs take up more space than public-posted threads, they are included).
 
Rei said:
I'm going to check to see if I can find a resource to help me split active and non-active threads.

I may be able to set it to 'message strings not active after' that preset date.

I stress you save as much as you can regardless, just in case.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
How to save something that is 30+ pages? Is there a way download it?

I can't save it post by post, as I don't have a laptop available and this is with such short notice, so honestly: I'm freaking out.

Once again, I do understand and respect the need for a site clean up, and I admire you guys for making this site what it is, but I'm honestly freaking out at the prospect of potentially losing the stories I've worked on with my dear friends for years 🙁 !!!
 
Rei said:
For public facing threads - I can specify deleting threads not active after 12/31/24 - but DMs will be anything before that day will be cleared.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So then it's less about activity and more about when the thread was started? In other words, if DMs were started in 2023, the entire thread needs to be saved because before that cutoff will be deleted if I am understanding correctly?
 
When something like this happened to me on a previous site that had to shut down (FictionDepot), the site owner created a page-formatting option that was optimized for easy export, meaning it had all of the posts from the entire thread on a single page, with each post having only the poster name and date (and a tiny avatar, but no signature), all in a single column to make the HTML simpler (poster ID sat above each post, divided by a hard rule). It made it very convenient for saving long threads.

You would access it through a link within the thread, to have it display the content using that formatting style, then you could just save it as one big HTML file. The longest story I had came out to about 2 MB, while the other shorter stories were in the hundreds of KB. It was very compact and clean.

Any chance you could set up something like that for us here?

It also worked for private message conversations, but in both cases there was a maximum number of posts it could display (some kind of limit on the size of DB query output), so some pagination might be required for the exceptionally long stories, if you end up going that route.

Here's an example of what it looked like:

fa750ab3e04a.png
 
_HEX_ said:
How to save something that is 30+ pages? Is there a way download it?

I can't save it post by post, as I don't have a laptop available and this is with such short notice, so honestly: I'm freaking out.

Once again, I do understand and respect the need for a site clean up, and I admire you guys for making this site what it is, but I'm honestly freaking out at the prospect of potentially losing the stories I've worked on with my dear friends for years 🙁 !!!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There's over a month to get things - so please take a moment to breathe and don't overstress yourself.

You should all be able to access a button in the DMs now that says "export direct message"
Screenshot 2025-12-28 211729.png

There is a screenshot of where it is at the top of the post. Once you have clicked that page, use "Ctrl + P" to create a PDF that you can then save.

This export will consolidate 500 posts into one batch for you to save - they will save as text PDFs, so you should be able to CTRL-F and search for any specific things!
 
humon said:
When something like this happened to me on a previous site that had to shut down (FictionDepot), the site owner created a page-formatting option that was optimized for easy export, meaning it had all of the posts from the entire thread on a single page, with each post having only the poster name and date (and a tiny avatar, but no signature), all in a single column to make the HTML simpler (poster ID sat above each post, divided by a hard rule). It made it very convenient for saving long threads.

You would access it through a link within the thread, to have it display the content using that formatting style, then you could just save it as one big HTML file. The longest story I had came out to about 2 MB, while the other shorter stories were in the hundreds of KB. It was very compact and clean.

Any chance you could set up something like that for us here?

It also worked for private message conversations, but in both cases there was a maximum number of posts it could display (some kind of limit on the size of DB query output), so some pagination might be required for the exceptionally long stories, if you end up going that route.

Here's an example of what it looked like:

fa750ab3e04a.png
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
THIS !! Yes, please please please let us have a channce to save our stories.
 
Oh, nice. I just checked and saw it. Is the same option available for threads too?

I also notice that this has a limit of 500 posts, just like on FD. Is there a way to separate the content into multiple 500-post pages?
 
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