The wiki http://eechcentral.SimHQ.com/index.php?title=Main_Page pointed to from https://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads....-before-posting-search-first#Post4387603 has a bunch of spam, starting on the front page. Worth locking down for a spell?

http://eechcentral.SimHQ.com/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=250

Why make yet another post about EECH wiki spammed clearly without even reading the thread which is just right below:

https://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads....eechcentral-website-hijacked#Post4625844

I can't tell if you are really curious or being passive aggressive. Lets assume the former for now. Thank for linking that topic as it does have a useful link, http://eechcentral.SimHQ.com/index.php?title=Special:Categories to real content 👍

The page for this forum has a lot of pinned topics, its basically the entire page. The page I linked to explicitly states to do a search as there is 20+ years of content, which I did. If you do a search for "wiki spam", the top hit is this thread. The thread you linked to is not in the list and is missing the key words wiki and spam.

@polak, do you have permissions to restrict the wiki to prevent more spam being posted? If not is there an admin we can contact?

I am only curious and possibly a little concerned about preserving the content of the EECH wiki. Little concerned only, because 3 months passed since the original report about spam and not much has changed. But then not much traffic on the forum anyway ... a real pity!

The best way to, as I see, is to copy and save the content as docx the way @Javelin preserved and then shared his 2 very interesting articles here:
https://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads....eechcentral-website-hijacked#Post4627878

Time permitting I may try to archive some of the articles this way. While doing so I may try to re-learn interesting tidbits about this great helicopter sim.

Oh dang, that is a scary thought! I agree doing something ourselves without admin support is likely necessary.

Any ideas on best way to make a backup? I'm making a guess that @Javelin did this by hand for those two docs, I'm too lazy to do that 😛 but I think your remark on re-learning tidbits does make manually doing this feasible (and the pages counts don't look crazy high).

I spent the evening writing a script to dump high-probability non-spam pages, however it is very possible I am missing pages (and I **may** have included some spam too). I think we are looking at less than 30Mb of data (that 30Mb figure includes some spam content) based on an initial scrape I performed. I have a list of just under 1000 pages, see https://pastebin.com/cyqj3MWm

The old version of mediawiki in use still has the old option "&printable=yes" working - which is the ideal way to get the text out if doing a simple scrape (and not extracting the raw mediawiki markup).

Quick and dirty options would be wget and other scrapping tools (pandoc is not bad). I ran out of time this evening to go further. I was hoping kiwix would be a good option but I can't see any scrape/downloading tools/options for mediawiki. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot might work, assuming eech wiki is not too old (with the API version the bot needs).

I've not looked at Archive.org yet.

Any value in:

1. new thread with "backup wiki" subject?

2. me posting the script(s) I have so far (to github)?

If one wants to save those EECH web pages it appears there are 3 options:

1. WEB Complete_files.html
creates file + folder with all hyperlinked pictures

2. HTML Only.html

3. WebSingleFile.mhtml

It seems that with option #1 all necessary and pertaining to the wiki article files/pictures/icons would be saved locally in the added single folder.

Now the question only is: what is the best way to open all that and then write it into a new self-contained and web independent document?

Hi folks. I am still around, just not active. I’ll log in and try to sort out the wiki.

Maybe someone else more active could be an admin too?

@messyhead Thank you for chiming in!
I possibly could help if required. Just need some guidance on what is to be done.

However, the best outcome of this entire affair with Wiki Rescue would be to get some rekindling of the interest in EECH by a broader number of old and possibly new members of this and other forums.
I know that DCS has some pretty strong helicopter modules as well and Microprose has announced its entry to the helicopter simulations with their Gunship remake. However, considering the availability of the source code in EECH and the kind of dynamic campaign EECH in my opinion is still the strongest contender for modding and providing the most satisfaction and creative freedom in doing that.

I also realize that it is really hard to convince newcomers about the depths and grandeur of the older simulators while some of the current competitions are (or are being promised to be) so shiny and slick.

Just trying...

I can’t commit any time to working on EECH unfortunately. The code is a pain to mod, and not easy to get into if you don’t have experience.

I had hoped that it could be given a makeover in the way that Falcon was, which I played for a while, but it would need a dedicated team of experienced developers to do.

I’ll try and look at the wiki over the weekend.

I just backed the wiki up for myself using HTTrack, it's an app that snags entire websites to run locally on your own computer.
It snagged all of the EECH wiki Category pages in about 5 seconds.

http://eechcentral.SimHQ.com/index.php?title=Special:Categories

I have little problem understanding the technical details behind such a backup.
Is this something totally independent of SimHQ and the internet connection to their website?
To put it in another way: if for any reason SimHQ goes offline will one be able to see the entire content of the wiki (text and pictures, etc.)? I realise that perhaps some legalities are involved, maybe?

@Javelin
HTTRack worked great for me too but I see all pictures are still hyperlinked to SimHQ. Thank you for the HTTrack suggestion.
And are those 2 wiki articles you posted some time ago: Advanced Topics and More AT available on wiki?

Hi. I tried logging in, but can't remember my username. I've emailed the SimHQ admin that helped set things up, to see if I can get FTP access again so that I can download the entire wiki and run it locally to fix it.

Main page was restored. Seems no other content damaged.

Were you able to get logged in and restore it? If you have admin access, could you reset my password?

I couldn't remember my login, and the SimHQ mod that helped the last time hasn't read my messages