Allow importing of public archive trees #46
Description
I've recently been made aware that public trees from before the Plum Tree shutdown have been archived at https://archive.org/details/public_tree_ids. While the number of people who have not made a backup of their trees themselves, but had made their trees public at some point, may not be large, it could still be worth it to provide a way to import trees.
Having looked at the backup data, it seems that no information was saved on which user a tree was submitted by. That's unfortunate, as this makes finding your lost trees more difficult. I still have some ideas on how we may be able to provide a way for users to find them:
- The title of the tree
- A full text search for the description of the tree
- Names of Sims that are part of the tree
We may want to use some form of fuzzy search, as we don't want spelling mistakes to prevent people from finding their trees, nor can we expect people to remember this information perfectly.
We then want to show users a list of results, with title, description and cover image being shown, as well as a button to import the tree.
Arguably this leaves one large issue:
The amount of images in the archive is too large to host on GitHub pages, and we also should not cache all this data for offline usage. Instead the data needs to be hosted separately. If you have any suggestions on how to best do this or how else we can allow importing of the public archive data, please leave a comment!