Tools of the Trade

[sneasel]

Okay, so if you are going to cover Internet drama and hilarity, there are some thing that should be kept in mind. First, when people find they are getting attention they do not want on the internet they will either double down on the crazy, or they will DELETE. FUCKING. EVERYTHING. If they double down, then you win. Content will continue to flow and you will have a better story to tell. If they go into DELETE mode, then it is best to have taken precautions. It is impossible to predict with absolute certainty how someone will react to receiving attention, even on a small forum such as ours, hence it is important to rely on resources that will support documentation and archival of their content. The purpose of this post is to outline several tools that are used and to provide links to where these tools can be found. Posts in this thread should be focused on critique of these tools, suggestions of new tools.

Archival Services

Pastebin

A good site for dropping text. If you have text conversations this can be a key tool to use. It can also be useful if you have information you need to drop, but you are not able to just yet. A similar service is Ghostbin, however Ghostbin posts will not be located if someone performs a search engine search.

archive.is

This is a good tool to save a webpage. Typically, if someone wishes to cover their internet footprint, they will delete their social media and may delete their blogs. archive.is will archive webpages on their website. This service will not save YouTube videos, so it is best to mirror these. I will discuss mirroring below.

Tweetsave

This service is simple and self-explanatory. It will save tweets. People commonly will delete embarrassing or otherwise interesting tweets when they realize they said something they wish they had not said. These tweets can be located through a web search.

imgur

This service will re-host images.

mixtape.moe

This service works similar to imgur, however you may re-host video and audio.

Browser Add-ons

Full Page Screen Capture

This tool will take a capture of an entire webpage. The good part of this tool is it is a simple button to grab everything. The downside is that it will grab the entire page and will not allow a user to select a section to cap.

archive.is instant archive button

This button will allow you to instantly select to archive a webpage.

imgur extension by Metronomik

This button will allow you to access your imgur upload account. When downloading this plug-in, there is also an additional option on the cursor to rehost images.

Video Downloader Professional

This service allows the user to download video files on websites such as facebook and YouTube.

GetThemAll

This tool allows the user the ability to download all images on a single webpage.

Autoscroll

For many modern webpages the page will continuously scroll rather than having several pages.

Capping Tools

TinyTake

This is a tool that allows a user the ability to clip video from the users computer.

Snipping Tool

This tool comes with Windows. Snipping tool allows the user the ability to capture sections of the screen. A useful aspect of this tool is as soon as it is captured it is possible to copy-paste the image.

Audacity

An audio program which is used to record audio. This can be useful if there is a live discussion about a topic of interest.