I Archived The Entire Subreddit And Coded A Simple Website To Read It | TheRedPill

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dream-hunter

Posted 6y ago in Uncategorized - Permalink - Locked - 11K Views

Preview: https://i.imgur.com/BXXQOke.png & https://i.imgur.com/niDdoEW.png

As a web developer that discovered TRP 1 year ago and is very grateful for the subreddit, I've always wanted to contribute here, but I never knew how, until now. After TRP has been quarantined, I feared it would get banned one day. So I decided to figure out a way to scrape the entire subreddit and have it viewed on a simple website.

I saw TRP's current backup of the subreddit and I wasn't happy with its design and hard-to-use website (and its lack of posts). So I decided to spend 8 hours trying to figure out how to scrape the entire subreddit and then code a website to view the posts as simple as possible.

Features:

4392 posts from TheRedPill & askTRP & RedPillParenting & RedPillWomen & ThankTRP
Comments (+ replies) included
TRP's subreddit theme
Search through all the posts instantly
Lightweight and simple to use website & no ads
DDoS protected and secured

NOTE: The purpose of the website is to only have an archive of TRP posts. This is not a place for people to post or comment. If you want to do that if TRP ever gets banned, visit the official website at https://www.forums.red/i/

To Mods: If this post is not allowed, please let me know and I'll remove it instantly. My intention is to only contribute to TRP and spread the idea to men around the world, I am in no way trying to harm this subreddit.

Edit: Thank you for the amazing feedback everyone. I just finished scrapping RedPillWomen & RedPillParenting & ThankTRP and added them both to the website. Up to 1.5k posts added.

Permalink

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

Thanks. So did we. https://www.forums.red/i/theredpill

We will always welcome more backup points, so thank you for helping out.

Our backup includes 3,176 Posts between TRP and AskTRP. With over 519,619 individual comments.

Counting RPW and ThankTRP, our total archive is 4,573 posts.

Instant search can be found here

In case of emergency we will release the entire database as torrent. FYI.

Forums opening soon with new mobile-friendly design.

drakehfh 6y ago

It would be good to make the site open source with all the database. That way people would contribute.

throne_deserter 6y ago

TRP changed my life. Quarantine had me scared but I am glad that you guys are doing all this for those who might need help.

RainySeasonInPH 6y ago

Not sure if you guys are aware, the entire reddit post history is backed up on google biquery. I've used it to dredge old redpill posts. I'm pretty sure there's also a torrent.

shownothirstyo 6y ago

Yours looks great, its the go to back up. His however is quite a bit faster and very sleek, a collaboration would be nice.

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

While we are working on proper caching at the moment, I'm legitimately curious what makes you say that.

https://www.forums.red/i/theredpill generates in 0.2027 seconds. A page with 345 comments generated in 0.1854 seconds.

A side-by-side load test shows my pages serve a bulk of the page 1 full second quicker (aside from post-loaded JS and images, which are specifically set to load slowly)

http://a.trp.red/files/timing.jpg

I'm hoping to streamline this so please let me know.

standardmissile 6y ago

Brilliant. Apart from the practical benefit this is a great example of DOING rather than WHINGING in response to the quarantine.

Some readers here really are internalising TRP and it's fantastic to see. Well done OP.

Magnus_ORily 6y ago

I feel part of an ancient civilisation who's history has been preserved

A_Bandini 6y ago

Beautiful work dude. Thank you for this. The sacred archives cannot be lost

ReeZoX 6y ago

Really like it!

Only thing I would like is being able to sort/search the results based on the categories (flairs) and then sort that with the most upvoted one's :)

dream-hunter 6y ago

Doing that is possible. Click on the Category column on the table two times then you'll see the most upvoted posts on that flair (or type the entire category's name in the search function). You can even see the most upvoted posts of each subreddit; just click the Subreddit column.

Thank you for the feedback!

ReeZoX 6y ago

The search function works, but I can't switch the category on the column, there's either "Science" or none/unspecified displaying for me there ;)

dream-hunter 6y ago

Refresh page > click Column tab two times then you'll see the posts from each category in order of most upvoted.

Asktrpthrowaway420 6y ago

Really awesome, clean and easy to navigate

_Neon_Shadow_ 6y ago

Amazing! I'm not in love with trp.red but this is an excellent substitute. Thank you.

lemonized 6y ago

Thank you! This is just so compact and simply amazing. Contains every type of sorting and a live search. Amazing work. Never hurts to have more backups just in case I guess.

[deleted]

Brushyourteethm8 6y ago

Solid work, thanks! Will you be doing the same for AskTRP, MRP and AskMRP? Some solid posts and advice in each

dream-hunter 6y ago

I'll run my scrapper on all the Red Pill subreddits from the sidebar, I kinda forgot about those.

They'll be on the site within 48hr.

Brushyourteethm8 6y ago

Good effort, thanks

bousezz 6y ago

sub posts can be formatted as a document. which document format do you prefer ?
html, pdf, epub, and plain text.

i am a software developer.

huhub 6y ago

I've been working on one of TRP backups, tried to post here, but the post did not make it.

AskTRP announce is here: asktrp/comments/9jxdtf/trp_sub_offline_backup/

I have completed 2016 and 2017, 2013-2015 are in progress, and I'm going to periodically update 2018. The entire archive contain 68,000+ posts + uncountable comments, no scripts and other unnecessary information (which reduced the size by half at least).

ubisoft-vs-ea 6y ago

You are amazing, if I wasn’t poor I’d give you gold

El_Ejcovero 6y ago

You can never have too many backups, especially with the purging of "controversial" content and people online as of late.

duehvdke 6y ago

You're doing god's work my guy, keep it up!

MortalSisyphus 6y ago

This is amazing. It would be great to have this done on my subreddit, which is obviously at high risk of being banned. Since you already developed the code, would it be particularly difficult to set this up for another sub? Please let me know.

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/9mr07o/our_open_invitation_to_mods_join_our_life_raft/

YesToControversy 6y ago

Have this virtual beer, mate. Don't drink it and drive though!

????

wereworm5 6y ago

You are the hero we all wanted !

[deleted]

DulceDeLecheMardel 6y ago

Can you make it downloadable so we can mirror it?

SalesOverEverything 6y ago

Just wanted to thank you as well. This makes a real impact on men everywhere, usually for the better.

Thank you.

WarViper1337 6y ago

With the way things are going having extra back ups is probably a good thing.

robodylan123 6y ago

Did something similar here: http://trpbackup.com I have every single post backed up but only the top 1000 are browsable at the moment. You’ll be able to search all of them soon though.

[deleted]

hardlifeman 6y ago

Thanks for doing this.

When I click on these "load more comments" in old posts, it opens up a seperate "about:blank" page.

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

Until he fixes it, forums.red does have exhaustive comment chains.

dream-hunter 6y ago

Load more comments, unfortunately, doesn't work, as I wasn't able to scrape those.

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

This might help:

        $json = $this->request('/api/morechildren', array(
            'link_id' => 't3_' . $link_id,
            'children' => implode(',', $children),
            'api_type' => 'json',
        ));

https://www.reddit.com/dev/api#GET_api_morechildren

dream-hunter 6y ago

Thank you, looks good. Unfortunately, I didn't scrape the posts using Reddit's API. I might be able to find another way to do it, though.

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

Gotcha, good luck.

[deleted]

izzyinjurious 6y ago

What language did you use to scrape it? It's awesome btw good work.

dream-hunter 6y ago

PHP, my favorite language. :) Thank you!

McDrMuffinMan 6y ago

Wow.... You're either a masochist or something else.

God speed Man!

TheTriviaMan 6y ago

I write php myself and even though you've already done the scraping I would suggest for any future developers to use a python library known as "beautiful soup" https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/ it's made specifically for web scraping

SpiderAlpha33 6y ago

Yeah BeautifilSoup is fast and reliable, and for dynamically generated websites I use Selenium with headless Firefox.

the-dan-man 6y ago

Out of curiousity, why is PHP your favourite language, and where did you learn it?

dream-hunter 6y ago

I don't remember, but long ago I wanted to start coding my own screenshot software, and my friend told me I could do that with my back-then favorite language & PHP, so I started learning PHP.

I learnt PHP by coding, and whenever I wanted to code something, I searched on Google about it and read the code. PHP is really simple.

ThePantsThief 6y ago

Why scrape it when they have an API? Fellow developer here. Curious in case the scraping solution is better somehow

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

The https://forums.red/i/TheRedPill archive was done via API

needz 6y ago

Sometimes if you already have your favorite tool and it works, there's no need to learn another tool (or in this case, API).

SilkTouchm 6y ago

Scraping is always harder than just using the api.

needz 6y ago

Never say never or always.

So if I've been using BeautifulSoup since it came out, have an entire framework and dev environment dedicated to scraping websites and have little to no experience with APIs, which is gonna be harder?

SilkTouchm 6y ago

which is gonna be harder?

Scraping, by far. It doesn't matter how much experience you have, you still have to do the legwork. An API is just using a few pre-packaged methods, you don't need experience on it.

fuckboiwithfeelings 6y ago

The community that keeps on giving, way to go!

dream-hunter 6y ago

Looking forward to contributing more. If you have more ideas about TRP for a web developer, let me know!

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

I can invite you to our private dev forum (open soon). Instead of duplicating efforts we have a lot of tasks that need doing.

RedPillHanSolo 6y ago

I've sent you numerous e-mails, but haven't heard back. Is it because you didn't get them or you only invite trusted members and whatnot?

redpillschool Admin 6y ago

I haven't forgotton about you. I simply haven't gotten the private forum running yet. Lots of work going on in the background.

johnpayne10 6y ago

Dude, excellent job. The website interface is really smooth, it loads very quickly. I want to give two suggestions though.

First: Maybe you shouldn't put asktrp posts in there? Most of the posts in asktrp are not worth anyone's time. It is a good thing to provide advice to someone asking for help. But I don't think it is necessary to add asktrp questions to the archive site. Add more TRP posts if you can. Because the posts and the comments sections on TRP are invaluable. If you already have added the top posts from all time, add the ones from this current year. Add the hot posts. The new posts.

Second: For the posts that you have uploaded only a part of the comments section is avaIlable. If possible, try to add the entire comments section for all posts. Because their is a lot of gold in the comments.

That being said, you have done an excellent job. It will help a lot of people out there. So congratulations and thank you.