OK, quick summary first. The town of Merrimack, NH, USA had been running a ubb.classic web forum until last month. On November 14th the town selectmen (a board of 5 elected officials responsible for running the town) voted to close it down. You can see the locked/closed forum at
http://www.ci.merrimack.nh.us/ubb-bin/ There is also a
http://www.townsforum.com/HollisNHforum/viewtopic.php?t=270 collection of newspaper articles about forum closure on another web forum for a nearby town.
The town has archived the data, and as a citizen I've gotten a copy of the data (no licensed code, just the text based files that the cgi-bin would read from) and I'm looking for a simple and quick way to generate passable static HTML from these flat files. Is a tool like this available? If there isn't a tool available is there a description of the file format? It's clear that || is a field delimiter, but many of the fields are blank.
I don't want to run a forum using this data, I simply want to make it available for reading online.
Thanks,
-Nat
