Thank. you SO much Computer Ninja @mcdanlj !!
Awesome!
Thanks to the Friends+Me Google+Exporter author for sharing documentation with me, we now have bold, italic, and strikethrough formatting preserved in the output.
Google finally, after months of unconscionable delay, has told us: they will be deleting all the G+ content, including images and videos. Starting 2 April.
There are nearly 200 missing images/videos from this community in the backup archive. Help now if you care to save them. I’m hoping that updates to the export tool allow us to save some of the missing comments, but I’m not expecting that missing images and videos will show up automatically. See the instructions above to help, and ask if you need help following the instructions.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-sunset-of-consumer-google-plus-on-april-second
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-sunset-of-consumer-google-plus-on-april-second
@mcdanlj this is great (about the italics and formatting). Once I get through some of these on site installations I have going right now I hope to dig into manually downloading the missing files unless there is another method that comes up from the group in the interim.
@Eclsnowman Maybe! We can see what they give us now, and in March (wow that’s cutting it close) we’ll see what else it gives us. But I wouldn’t count on it. It will probably work for only some of the images or videos. It is likely to give us the text of the missing comments if F+M G+E doesn’t first fix the problem with incomplete comment streams.
Unless google go out of their way to make it difficult, it won’t be tremendously hard to add code to parse that data.
The next release of F+M G+E is expected to solve the missing comment problem, as well as recognizing and fixing one of the common sources of missing images in this community! Yay!
Meanwhile, I’m also checking out the current content of a community takeout, which Google promises will improve in March (that’s cutting it close…) — it may or may not help fill in any gaps by then.
If anyone is willing to help improve the ugly formatting by experimenting with Jekyll themes, that could be nice. I don’t see one that mimics the Google+ experience, but I haven’t looked much at all.
The current takeout for a community is 99.75% useless, and it’s hard to tell what Google will see fit to release in late March, a few days before they unceremoniously pull the plug.
Meanwhile, the new F+M G+E 1.7.7 release seems to have done a good job of getting the missing comments, and also found a few (7) more pictures. That’s the good news.
Getting through all the comments showed lots more missing images. We now have 191 missing images thanks to bringing in the missing comments, and there are still 75 videos missing from the archive. It will be up to the community to fill those in.
@mcdanlj Can a list of the missing urls be generated? I will manually download pictures and videos tonight.
The https://gitlab.com/eclsnowman/eustathios_herculien_ingentis_gplus/blob/master/README.md file has instructions for how to fix the missing images and videos.
I am liking the look and feel of wikifactory so far. Time will tell but they are building a platform for migrating G+ communities and I like the vibe I am seeing over there so far. Seems much more inline with the types of people that drew me to G+. I am not sold yet… but so far that is my front runner to move the Eustathios/HercuLien for the future posts.
Looks interesting. Given that community takeout has no post content, I wonder whether it is aspirational or if they are screen scraping like F+M G+E? Also, will they provide content to community owners so that it’s not out of the frying pan and into the fire?
@mcdanlj very true. I might just be trading masters. But I am looking for a system ideally with a low barrier to to user entry, public viewability, and ease of content addition. Like I said, I am not sold yet… But so far, I like the interface and projects I saw posted.
Yeah, a gitlab pages site isn’t exactly a low barrier to entry. But it is worth asking them about data portability. I note they are in EU and interpretations of GDPR are rampant and diverse, and as a commercial entity they might have to react in unexpected ways as case law develops.
All the missing image files in comments are fixed by the latest update to the exporter.
There are 60 posts with videos missing in the import, and I have updated http://README.md to describe how to fix them. It will involve a lot of downloading and posting to youtube… 
HMM maybe it is G+ not liking new images being added to the database. It used to be in my comment… now it seems broken in that post:
I was just about to post that picture, but you beat me to it.
I’ve been working on http://forum.makerforums.info with @funinthefalls and it might be a great option for this community. In particular, I’m trying to do imports of old community posts from multiple communities into that forum, which could include this community.
I have just enabled Google login for http://forum.makerforums.info so that anyone with a G+ account should find it trivial to log into http://forum.makerforums.info — just choose the “with Google” link on login and it should just work. That seems like an easy way for folks here to move into a new community populated by makers in related areas.
Go ahead and look in and see what you think.