by linebyline » Sun Apr 20, 2014 7:53 pm
It probably wouldn't even need to be all that custom. I mean, PHPBB is a pretty common, open-source forum software product thingy. If you're up for it, it shouldn't be hard to get the schema info from the PHPBB docs and then write something to export it. The problem is what you're going to export it to. For that, you'll need to know a little about what kinds of permissions Ian does and doesn't have, so I definitely second Sunwalker's suggestion of PMing Ian.
(Reimporting it later may also be a challenge, but PHPBB isn't going to care where the schema and data actually came from as long as they're put back the way it expects. After all, HTTP is stateless, so any Web app has to put its toys away neatly every time and start over from scratch on every page load anyway. That's why we have session cookies.)
And I hate to say it, but if I were Ian, I'd be mighty suspicious of a bunch of total strangers offering to help if he'll just give out a little bit of info and/or run one little arbitrary script on his server. That's probably just me being paranoid, but then again since anything connected to the Internet is almost certainly under attack at all times, sometimes it pays to be a little paranoid. I'm not saying "Watch out, Ian, Lighty's trying to HACK you!" (you could make the same accusation about my own advice earlier in this thread); just that "beware of geeks bearing gifts" is probably a good idea in general.