Awful Utils: A set of utilities for the Something Awful forums

Features

• Export thread to local disk for archival purposes
• Retrieve user details

Notice

This library is not affiliated with Something Awful LLC in any way

Installation

You must have Python 3.2 or later installed. The exact commands used here may vary by operating system.

Using a Virtual Environment is always recommend to avoid installing packages system wide.

To create the Virtual Environment and activate it:

$ mkdir ~/.virtualenvs
$ python3 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/awfulutils
$ source ~/.virtualenvs/awfulutils

Now that your Virtual Environment is activated, you can install Awful Utils by running:

$ pip install git+git://github.com/fletchowns/awfulutils.git

If a new version is pushed, you can upgrade yours by doing:

$ pip install --upgrade git+git://github.com/fletchowns/awfulutils.git

Don't forget to activate your Virtual Environment whenever you open a new terminal!

$ source ~/.virtualenvs/awfulutils

Usage

Use your web browser to figure out your bbuserid and bbpassword cookie values for forums.somethingawful.com

Now you should be able to run the command to export a thread:

$ awful_export_thread --userid 38563 --session 99bd7c5025316dae9dcb6ea6d7366870 --threadid 2675400

Be sure to check for errors in the output! There might be a bug that leads to an incomplete export.

Unfortunately, you may see errors downloading images. You can double check the URL in your own browser, it may be a site that is long gone.

Log a ticket with the stack trace and the threadid you tried to export so we can fix it!

For a full list of arguments:

$ awful_export_thread --help

Example Library Usage

Example of retrieving user details from Python code:

>>> from awfulutils.awfulclient import AwfulClient
>>> awful_client = AwfulClient(38563, '99bd7c5025316dae9dcb6ea6d7366870')
>>> awful_client.userinfo(27691).username
'Lowtax'