Old cgmartini.nl forum posts?

[ricalessandri]

Hi @danielpastor97 & @Lp0lp - just thought of something: did we lose (access to) all the posts in the old cgmartini.nl forum? I suppose it would (have) be(en) good to salvage some of that material... maybe give it to ChatGPT or your favorite LLM to make a summary of that and add it to the FAQs or something.

[Lp0lp]

Hey @ricalessandri . We considered finding a way of somehow archiving the forum. In reality we could not find a way (to be fair I did not dig too much into it) to do so. We did build a FAQ based on the old one and I tried to update it somewhat based on the posts I saw on the forums but obviously did not dig through it all.

[ricalessandri]

Gotcha. Are the posts still available somewhere? Perhaps I could help crystallize out some more FAQs.

[danielpastor97]

Forum posts should still be available on the old server machine in Groningen. I think we should keep an archive copy of it somewhere. Perhaps Alex can assist us with this. @AlexHdeVriesMDGroup ?

[AlexHdeVriesMDGroup]

Hello Daniel and Riccardo,
I need to confirm with our main webmasters. We did make a backup of the entire site in 2022, and have made updates since. As far as I can remember (but my memory is vague!), the forum entries (amongst other things?!?!) are collected in an sql data-base (extension .sql). If that is indeed the case, we have a backup of that dated August 25, 2024.

Is a .sql file something you guys can work with? I'm happy to make it available.

I will hopefully be able to have a chat with one of the old webmasters before the week-end.
Alex

[ricalessandri]

Hello Alex! That sounds good to me. While I'm not very familiar with .sql files, I understand that they should be sufficient for extracting the information we need. Also, (from a quick Google search,) we might be able to convert the data to JSON format if needed, which could make it easier to work with.

[AlexHdeVriesMDGroup]

Hello Riccardo, Daniel, and others,

Yesterday, I sat down with Bart and had a look at the .sql file. It turned out to be non-encrypted, so it can be opened in vi or another editor and you see the text. I do not know much about databases (and SQL), but learned a little bit yesterday. The .sql file itself, while readable is not a convenient format because it is full of SQL keywords and not nicely formatted.

We attempted to convert it to a .db format that can be browsed by nautilus. However, this ran into errors - the file was not recognized because it is not sqlite3, but MySQL. We then tried to install stuff to translate MySQL to sqlite3 but failed. We did manage to start up an interface using mysql (note that we used a copy on our local machines, not the webserver.). We could interact with it using mysql syntax (for example SHOW TABLES, which gives an overview of all content categorized, and SELECT * FROM j25_kunena_user_topics which contains a number of Forum discussions). I do not particularly like this interface, but there may be others. We did see there is a pandas reader for SQL but it did not work out of the box (probably need to install extra stuff) and did not have/take time to further pursue it.

Siewert would like to have recent Forum discussions (maybe from the past year) incorporated, but I think quite a few topics are already in the FAQ, so personally would not give it that much of priority if it turns out to be quite cumbersome.

Of course you can see what an LLM can do, but I would first clean up the file because it contains the entire website, including user names, encrypted passwords - these need to be handled with care (at least under European Law), tutorials and all other information. Maybe an LLM is smart enough; this is another area I know next to nothing about.

The full .sql file is about 7 Mb in size, so easy to transport over to any of you guys.

Many greetings, Alex

[ricalessandri]

Hi @AlexHdeVriesMDGroup , thanks for the detailed update and for taking the time to investigate the .sql file. Feel free to email the .sql file to Daniel, Luis, and me when convenient, and we’ll take it from there. No rush, as I won’t have time to look into it until mid-October, but I plan to do so then.

[danielpastor97]

Hi @ricalessandri, @Lp0lp, is this something we still want to pursue? I think the discussion board at https://github.com/orgs/Martini-Force-Field-Initiative/discussions is working well for this purpose. Let me know what you think.

If we agree this is no longer needed, I’ll go ahead and close the issue for now.