WWW-phpBB version 0.03
======================

DESCRIPTION

This module can be used to scrape a phpBB2 installation using the web interface.
It requires a local phpBB2 setup (you can download the old 2.x versions from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbb/files/phpBB%202/ ) that will be
overwritten and it can only access what is available to the web browser (i.e. no
private messages or user settings). Make sure the username used during the
local installation doesn't exist in the remote forum. Scraping is possible as a
guest or as a logged in member. If used with an administrator name and password
it will copy all the member e-mails (not just the public ones) allowing them to
request a new random password from the new installation site and continue using
the forum. The current implementation lacks search support, but this can be fixed
by converting the forum to phpBB3 or SMF. The "mforum" script is supported.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires:

WWW::Mechanize
Compress::Zlib
HTML::TokeParser::Simple
DBI
DBD::mysql

TODO

- better smiley set handling; copy smilies along with the post data
- parse more search engine friendly URLs

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2006-2011 by Stefan Talpalaru - <stefantalpalaru@yahoo.com>
[ email tied to a paypal account in case you want to buy me a cup of tea ;-) ]

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.12.2 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.


