Ok, so we haven't released any new hand-coded projects in some time, and this is the first of a few we've got lined up. Let me introduce you to the HIH EasyRead forum archives.

We want to take vBulletin, and an online forum community in general, to the next level, and this is the first step in that direction. Forums are great for many things, but they're also fairly poor at presenting information in an easily searchable, easily navigated, easily read format. This project takes aim at the last two of those.

We've created a few scripts that create static webpages filled with the content of each thread in a few select areas of our forum. This buys us a few things. First, it allows threads (now in webpage format) to be browsed all at once (no multiple pages), without all the overhead created by the vBulletin software (no avatars, gamercards, smilies, and the like). Another good result is that if we want to give someone a permalink to a thread in our forum that isn't likely to change much, we can link them to the archive version of that thread, and they'll see a nice HIH webpage version of the thread content.

In addition to the above, the search dudes (Google, Yahoo, etc.) have a difficult time crawling forums and making sense of the data. We're hoping that this archive will make our content more easily searchable, and findable, by the search machines of the interwebz.

This is version 1 of the archive, and I'm keeping a running list of bugs and suggestions, and so if you have any of either, place them in this thread. Once all the wrinkles are worked out, I'll probably update the entire archive once a week or so. Right now it's at a little under 9000 pages, written in 5-6 minutes by the script.