API, especially for comments #325
From Matthew.Fallshaw on August 02, 2012 23:05:27
Cc: Matthew.Fallshaw
From gwe...@gmail.com on August 07, 2014 18:34:00
A variant on this: I would really like a way to export or dump all of my LW comments. For a couple reasons:
- generic backup of my content (my archive system is good but won't catch everything)
- easier searching of my comments (I contribute so much that when I want to go back and find a reference or previous discussion, as I do frequently, it can be a challenge to refind something since throwing 'gwern' into the search terms doesn't narrow things down all that much)
- doing statistics on my comments (I've been building up a big dataset of personal metrics, and would like to be able to include # of LW comments per day and length of LW comments per day)
Right now, Wei Dai's script, while better than nothing, is imperfect. Aside from the wasted bandwidth, for my account, it's very slow compared to a database export, and I'm not sure I can actually grab all of my comments that way: I may simply not have enough RAM. (Not to mention that a giant HTML file isn't the best format to work with.)
It would be helpful if there was some sort of CSV or JSON export of all my comments. (Perhaps in a format like 'timestamp, user, comment ID, comment text, URL of parent comment/post, net karma, karma %, edited-or-not, # of replies'.)
From Matthew.Fallshaw on September 14, 2010 10:52:04
(from Wei Dai)
"LW doesn't seem to provide a way to grab 400 comments at once"
"… Greasemonkey script for making recent comments easier to read? The main problem with it is that it's not very efficient (slow to load comments, and uses more bandwidth than it needs to). I think I can make it much more efficient if LW provides an API to return a list of comments given a list of comment IDs, which could just be in the same format as http://lesswrong.com/comments. "
Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=227