Star Wars blogs going down

[Jedi Master Spock]

Some of you may have been notified, but the user-posted blogs on StarWars.com (which you might recall as playing host to some dramatic episodes, such as the Talifan bit) will be going down in about a week. If you want to save anything that you found on there - or document any of the old posts that you like to point to - now's the time.

[Mike DiCenso]

Thanks for the heads up on that, JMS. The only documentation of what happened regarding Wayne Poe and the whole "Talifan" incident should not be lost. Which means I'll have to work to get copies for the relevent Database articles covering that as well.
-Mike

[Tyralak]

I would recommend screen shots. In case the accusation were made that the text was altered, it could be proven otherwise.

[mojo]

hey, this might be a good time for a 'greatest hits' type thing! i'd love to have a look at anything anyone wants to point out!

[mojo]

also, will the relevant pages, like the 'talifan' thing, be added to the database? that might raise interest.

[Mike DiCenso]

The article is already there, just type in "talifan". Mostly what I'm trying to save is Dark Moose's blog describing Wayne Poe's conduct on StarWars.com with regards to Karen Traviss.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

For the archiving, there's a variety of tools. You can "print" pages by using PDF creators installed as printers, you can have some PDF this tools from the browser, or website which will produce PDFs for you by giving them the URL. You can screen cap the pages, and perhaps it's possible, although time consuming and not always clean, to use website rippers.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Last chance! They're going down tonight!

[mojo]

is anybody on this?

[2046]

I never got a chance to do anything with it.

However, all is not lost:

http://web.archive.org/web/201107161327 ... m/holocron

I don't think links to individual posts are working (or else the one I tried had been removed at some point), but the above is an example of getting to the blog of a particular user (in the above case, Leland Chee).

Internet Archive FTW.

Note, however, that the Archive is only up until July of 2011 . . . but I'm not aware of anything important happening after that. If there is something, Google may still have things cached for the next couple of days, too.

As for page saving, I wouldn't worry about getting all crazy with it. There is some program that makes screenshots that are considered courtroom-evidence-grade via some awesome technique or other (referenced way back when on Groklaw but I never could find it when I looked a few months back), but for the most part any basic screenshot or even .pdf is theoretically editable by a determined person with the right tools.

Probably the most difficult forgery would be something basic like a close camera snapshot of a CRT monitor, since getting the pixels looking right along with the editing of the text would be a challenge.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Surely, if you're aiming for court-grade evidence quality, you'll need better than that.
Basically, anything electronic can be edited. So you need to do what you described, that is, emulate a human witness, looking at a screen, and therefore providing a modicum of robustness to the evidence while you browse through the website.

[mojo]

i just want to be able to read anything interesting...

[2046]

ST-v-SW.Net

CanonWars.com

NoLettersHome.info

Mike's recipe for Cajun Mojo (which, besides being a joke in poor taste, also would be a good band name).

Anything written by our lovely and talented host.

But yeah, court-grade is rather extreme for this. It is one thing for foes to try to lie with misleading screenshots in a debate, but reasonable people would be less likely to accept. Rabid denials of the truthfulness of the Wayback Machine regarding just some particular fanboy's blog post.

[2046]

On the topic of page-saving:

http://www.freezepage.com

[Nowhereman10]

Nice one there. I'll have to remember that!