My Opera

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My Opera
My Opera 2013-10-31 20-11-38.png
URL my.opera.com[IAWcite.todayMemWeb], files.myopera.com[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]
Status Offline
Archiving status Saved!
Archiving type Unknown
Project source https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/myopera-grab
Project tracker http://tracker.archiveteam.org/myopera
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
(formerly #fatlady (on EFnet))
Data[how to use] #Archives

My Opera is a social media website for the Opera browser. Originally started as just a support forum, it later expanded to include blogging, image/file hosting, and email.

On October 31, 2013, Opera announced they would shut My Opera down on March 1, 2014. On February 19, 2014, this was changed to March 3, 2014.

Shutdown notice

... The explosion of these sites and the amount of resources we need to maintain our own service has changed our outlook on My Opera. We had a good run for many years, but we believe your content could have a better home elsewhere, so we have made the decision to shut down My Opera as of March 1, 2014. [1]

The shutdown affects blogs/comments, files, email, and their forums ('The most important existing threads will be moved...').

On February 24, 2014, this message was placed on each forum/topic:

The My Opera forums are being replaced by our new forums. Starting February 26th, the My Opera forums will be in read-only mode. On March 3rd, they will be removed along with the rest of My Opera.

Archives

There are two ways to browse the archives:

  • If you don't find anything, you can try extracting the files from the WARC files with some WARC tools.
    • This method requires power user skills. In essence, scan each CDX index file and then extract it from the appropriate WARC files. Ask us in IRC for help.

Links to WARC files:

Archiving and contributing

Phase 0: Initial crawl

  • Grab a seed list of users from the location pages. Done! 1,621,618 usernames (location pages + files.myopera.com initial grab + attempted forum grab + wallpaper grab)
  • Grab a list of links to all forum topics and all pages. (In progress by User:Mithrandir) Had some issues with this one (my fault), probably better to:
  • Crawl all forums topics and pages (Not in progress)
  • Grab user-uploaded Opera-themed wallpapers Done!

Phase 1: Username crawl

https://github.com/garyrh/myopera-username-grab

Fortunately, Opera was kind enough to provide us with a complete list of all non-banned users (thanks to Atluxity for setting this up!)

Full list in 7z archive

(Note: The original list had some encoding issues as well as some invalid usernames, but this was relatively easy to fix with the FTFY library. You can download the original, non-fixed list here and here.)

Phase 2: Content crawl

Please run your Warrior and select the My Opera project. Wait a while for it to install extra things and it should start downloading.

Alternatively, the scripts can be run manually and instructions are located here: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/myopera-grab

Site structure notes

  • As of 2009, there were around 16 million users.
  • LOTS of old data, abandoned accounts, etc.
  • Forum topics go all the way back to Post #1 dated 7 September, 2001.
    • It looks like there are nearly 2 million topics.
  • There's a sub-domain that houses user uploaded data.
    • Initial Bing-crawled list here (5572 urls)
    • Tons of webpages, pdfs, images, archives, etc.
    • Some of this data is linked to in blog posts, so we should crawl blogs for this as well.
  • Pretty much any UTF-8 (?) character can be used in a username (e.g. §|-|€€PJU|)g³ or ္္္္္္္floppyeye)

Username discovery

  • This is a little tricky, as the only pages with a large list of usernames are the location pages.
    • Each country list is paginated, showing at most 72 users per page.
    • For large countries, going past page ~325 returns many 503 errors.
    • Assuming an average of 100 retrievable pages per country and 246 countries, that's 72*100*246 = 1,771,200 users.
    • Excludes users who haven't set their location, which seems to be a lot.
    • This should be good for a seed list.
  • Forum posts, blog comments, friend lists, and groups seem to be the best ways to get the most usernames. (Maybe throw in the recent visitors list too.)

References

External Links