Forum Moderators: open
I'm an undergraduate student doing a final year project.
Desperately trying to get hold of an sample forum database in order to perform an experiment on data visualization.
my requirements are as follows:
- reasonably large amount of user posted contents (i.e. more than 1000 topics/thread and 10000 posts)
- suitable topic (no indecent material)
- forum is from a open source or widely used type of forum software and using mySQL as the database.
(e.g. phpbb, vbulletin, etc... )
I'm willing to change/scramble the usernames so that users will remain anonymous, remove file attachments, or do anything not to violate copyrights, etc...
The experiment will be done offline, on a server at school.
Also willing to pay a small amount for the effort involved.
Really hoping that someone here has some suggestions on how I can acquire such a sample forum database ?
Or would some kind soul who owns a forum be willing to help me out ?
People are very sensitive about their data. I honestly think you won't get any takers on this, plus it's rather difficult to move that much data around.
I would suggest that you download something like a free phpBB and install it on your own or a friends computer or server. There are still plenty of free hosting services available.
As part of your project, get a bunch of your friends to make posts to your needs.
Good luck with it!
No offense, but there are a lot of folks out there that would abuse this "school work" angle to get a free ticket to jump start/seed a new site...
Your only chance may be a hack that already stole a database from someone, and wants to sell it to you.