HTTrack Website Copier
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Subject: Re: mirror webforum sites
Author: Den
Date: 07/09/2026 15:27
 
Hi! Your English is fine, don't worry. Here's what you need.

The command
bash

wget ^
  --mirror ^
  --convert-links ^
  --adjust-extension ^
  --restrict-file-names=windows ^
  --level=3 ^
  --wait=2 ^
  --random-wait ^
  --limit-rate=50k ^
  --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" ^
  --page-requisites ^
  --no-parent ^
  -e robots=off ^
  --span-hosts ^
  --domains=forumromanum.com ^
 
<https://62902.forumromanum.com/member/forum/forum.php?action=ubb_tindex^&USER=user_62902^&threadid=2>
On Linux/macOS replace ^ with \ for line continuation, and & doesn't need
escaping.

Explanation of each flag
Flag
What it does
--mirror	Recursive download (alias for -r -N -l inf)
--level=3	Max recursion depth = 3
--convert-links	Rewrite links in downloaded HTML to point to local files
--adjust-extension	Adds .html to PHP pages so Windows can save them
--restrict-file-names=windows	Replaces ?, &, = etc. with safe chars
--wait=2	2 sec pause between requests
--random-wait	Random variation (0.5×–1.5× of --wait) to look human
--limit-rate=50k	Cap download speed at 50 KB/s
--user-agent="..."	Pretend to be Chrome instead of wget
--page-requisites	Download CSS/JS/images for the page
--no-parent	Don't go above the starting URL
-e robots=off	Ignore robots.txt (forums often block crawlers)
--span-hosts + --domains=...	Follow links to subdomains of forumromanum.com

About forum.php → .html
--adjust-extension + --restrict-file-names=windows will transform:

text

forum.php?action=ubb_tindex&USER=user_62902&threadid=2
into something like:

text

forum.php@action=ubb_tindex&USER=user_62902&threadid=2.html
The ? becomes @, and .html is appended. Not pretty, but Windows-safe and works
locally.

Important warnings
Forum logins: If threads require login, wget won't get them — you'd need
--cookies=on --load-cookies=cookies.txt with exported browser cookies.
Dynamic content: If the forum uses JavaScript to load posts, wget can't render
JS. You'd need a headless browser (httrack with JS, or Playwright/Puppeteer)
instead.
Server load: Even with --wait=2, a big forum can take hours. Be patient.
Legal/ToS: Check forum's Terms of Service before mirroring. Some forbid
automated scraping.
Simpler alternative: HTTrack
If wget keeps giving trouble, try HTTrack (https://www.httrack.com/) — it's
purpose-built for mirroring websites with a GUI and handles dynamic URLs
better.

Good luck!
 
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Subject Author Date
mirror webforum sites

07/09/2026 11:16
Re: mirror webforum sites

07/09/2026 15:27




d

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