Texas's research tool down

[The Stalker]

As many are already likely aware of Texas has had this handy little research tool available here; http://nsdossier.texasregion.net/

Within it's history section it allows one to search the long term histories of individual nations.

Very helpful, in many regards, and it fairly obvious for why I need a tool like this, sadly however it no longer dates back to 2003ish, but only to the end of 2015... 12 years missing.

At this point it seems unclear when or if it will return fully, I wanna reach out to the technical savvy to see if there are any similar tools out there available or encourage someone with technical knowledge to help Texas. Or best and most unlikely encourage technical mods to add something like this as an in-game feature.

[Weed]

I'm not sure if a tool exists, but some really old daily batches are lying around, I've run across some myself. In the absence of keeping one for every day, if we could even have one per month it'd let us more or less know if a nation was in the WA long-term or associated with certain regions.

I too have been missing the tool.

EDIT: I'll look around and see if I can remember where I came across all those old daily dumps.

[Riemstagrad]

Contact newtexas about this. He can probably help.

[Ballotonia]

EDIT: I'll look around and see if I can remember where I came across all those old daily dumps.

You mean: https://www.nationstates.net/page=archive ?

Ballotonia

[Weed]

This is probably what I was remembering. Awesome, Ballo! So, Stalker, unless someone with more computer know-how than I could take that and make a working tool I will be opening a few random files in each year and CTRL+F for the nation name inside the tags.

[The Stalker]

Hmm cool that could work, thanks for the input Weed and for find that for us Ballotonia!

Though it seems to require a program to decompress the file, my computer keeps pointing me to things that cost like 30 bucks, is there any free programs out there I could use?

[Caelapes]

WinRAR should do the job.

[Phydios]

7-zip is free and open-source, and can compress and decompress many archive formats. It's what I use.

[The Stalker]

Meh I can't seem to get this to work...

Couldn't find a place to download WinRAR for free, I think I got 7-Zip downloaded right but I can't get the files on the archive page to work properly. Probably because my computer is sh*t.

[Weed]

Can you use 7-zip to extract all? It'll save it in a new folder (I leave the new folder in Downloads, but wherever) then I open it with notepad.

It is easier to read if you open it on Notepad+ or something else, but notepad works and doesn't take forever to open the file.

Where are you getting stuck at? Unzipping the download, or opening the file after that?

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

I covert it to a .zip and open it in excel. It's does a number on your cpu and not everyone can load it without it crashing, but you can trim it a lot with some manipulation of columns and then even do basic math and programs with it.

[The Stalker]

Well I think my major issue is my crappy computer. So far most files take awhile to download and half fail to download.

I mostly figured out 7-Zip, but when I extract the file it tries to open a webpage that never loads.

[Riemstagrad]

try to "open with" notepad. and then wait for it to load. My old machine does everything slow but it can open a region file in 8 seconds

When opened, do search (ctr+F), then search for "<REGION><NAME>Hell</NAME>" to find region Hell.

But to open it, use "open with" and select notepad or search for that program if it's not in the list.
that, or rename the files from *.xml to *.txt, then double-click to open.

[Bruination]

EDIT: I'll look around and see if I can remember where I came across all those old daily dumps.

You mean: https://www.nationstates.net/page=archive ?

Ballotonia

I'm finding it nearly impossible to download dumps in the Nations category. I was able to download a couple of the earliest dates, but most files I choose seem to either A) download 0 bytes and then just fail after a minute or so or B) download a few MB in the first 1-2 seconds, then get stuck and fail again after a minute or so (Firefox). With repeated tries, it just does one of these 2 things, never fully downloading the file. I've tried this a couple of different days at different times with the same results. Any help with this?