Save okcupid messages in bulk?

February 9, 2011 1:44 AM

Is there a way to save one's okcupid messages? A grease monkey script perhaps? How about a way to save your questions/answers? I've invested a lot of energy into the site and I'd like to have a backup in case the match.com people ruin everything.
posted by Popcorn to computers & internet (5 answers total)

For those just hearing about this: On the blue.
posted by Gordafarin at 5:04 AM on February 9, 2011

They don't seem to have a public developer API. But if we can trace the API calls from their iPhone/Android clients, it might be possible then to write a client to invoke just the APIs to retrieve your messages. Or go the greasemonkey route like you suggested.
posted by lahersedor at 5:08 AM on February 9, 2011

The absolute simple way is to take screencaps which may not work for everything you have in mind.
posted by JJ86 at 7:28 AM on February 9, 2011

The screen caps workflow seems more labor intensive than just copy pasting every message since I still have to open each one and do a few tasks on each message. So far the best idea I have is just to open all of them in whole shitload of tabs and then use Universalprint firefox extension to print all open tabs to pdf, but that's still pretty labor intensive.

I'm not much of a coder so I have no idea how to write a grease monkey script to do the job. I guess I'm surprised that there is no existing solution out there for this given the size and nerdyness of the OKC userbase.

Any other ideas?

If there is a coder out there that knows how to do this, I'd totally pay for your time to write such a script. I'd rather give my money to a mefite than give money to OKC so I can join their A-list and get a larger inbox.
posted by Popcorn at 2:53 PM on February 9, 2011

I had the same question recently, and the handful of existing scripts I found didn't work (probably because OkC has updated their HTML), so I decided to just write my own.

http://github.com/lehrblogger/OkCupid-Message-Downloader

I doubt OkC has changed anything in the past few days, so it should still work. Let me know if you run into any problems!
posted by lehrblogger at 8:13 PM on April 6, 2011