Many thanks for your replies! I think you all suggest to code something myself (I am thinking about some quick and dirty Python).

So let's assume I do so and want to limit myself to one or maybe a couple of boards: which would you suggest?

Personally I think the Speculation board (under Economics) could potentially be very useful for sentiment analysis.

Hopefully the subject of this thread is not all too cryptic . Anyways, in what follows I will try to explain why I would like to obtain some sort of a copy of the Bitcoin Forum and how (in case you are interested) you could possibly help me (by allowing me to pick your brains).

Here is the story: (you can skip this and the next paragraph in case you do not care about the story)
I am a university student, working on a big (well, it is big for a student  ) project: it involves replicating existing research and trying to come to similar (or maybe not?) conclusions. Whenever possible one tries to make some improvements. We are free to do whatever we want, as long as it is related to our field of studies. Obviously I wanted to do something with Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general). Given that my degree situates itself at the conjuncture of finance and computer science it had to be finance related as well.

You might be aware of quite a lot of research that has been done on trying to predict the Bitcoin price based on all kind of data sources. Often one tries to relate it to the EMH-theory. I try to do something similar. More specifically I am trying to replicate some research involving sentiment analysis and apply it to Bitcoin. Also I try to improve on the data sources that have been used (so far: not much in my humble opinion). E.g. I will try to include the sentiment of Chinese news sources. Another thing that I have noticed is that I never came across such a paper that included Bitcoin Forum. I might be mistaken, but to me it seems that if someone knows what will happen with Bitcoin (and its price), (s)he is probably active here.

In conclusion: I would like to perform sentiment analysis on (among others) this forum's threads. The idea of this post is to get some input (from admins, moderators or whoever that has some affinity with the topic) on how to do so. Namely I would need a copy of all publicly available posts (or maybe one specific board) so that I can process it easily. I know there are different ways to try to achieve this:

• wget the entire website
• use existing tools for scraping phpbb forums
• code a scraper myself
• ask very nicely to get a database backup

While probably I could try all of them and figure what works best (or what does not work), I would first like to ask for your input before I waste a lot of time, bandwidth and the admins patience .

So input on how to do this technically, legally (e.g. what I can and cannot do), socially (e.g. who of the admins I should ask)... is very welcome. Also if you want to discuss the project itself: please feel free (not sure if this violates the 'no off-topic reply rules').

Thanks!