In the highly unlikely event that TMF ever let us have a copy of their database (all bulletin boards like this and TMF are databases and the 'posts' we read are actually database queries) the task of translating the record structure from one BB format to another is daunting. That's for modern well-structured BB systems for which the record format is known and documented - the TMF one was a bespoke in-house design unlike any other (by necessity, there were no full-feature BBs at the time). The world moved on, and the TMF design didn't. I think we have to accept we will never be able to 'extract' the old posts.
Fortunately we don't have to. The WayBack Machine has already archived many of them. Hopefully the old boards will just go 'read-only', but should they disappear for good we can still find a copy to link to. For example, this is a post I made on unitisation, which has links to the posts I learned it from. All are in the WayBack Machine for posterity....
https://web.archive.org/web/20120314180716/http://boards.fool.co.uk/brees-hypish-units-12469453.aspx
(apparently we can't post links, so you'll have to copy and paste this into your browser's address bar)
....well, they are now My post was already there, but the two I linked to weren't. Trying to follow the links, the Wayback Machine said...
This page is available on the web!
Help make the Wayback Machine more complete!
Save this url in the Wayback Machine
...so I did (save it, that is). The pages I asked to be saved contained valuable contributions from TJH and Gengulphus.
The limitation of the Internet Archive is that you can't easily search for a particular post, so get working now while we can still search the Fool. Find those posts you regard as significant and see if https://archive.org/web/ has already archived them. If not, ask it to!
Bree.