I scrape posts as a guest, without logging in. That means I only see HTML, there is no BBCode.
The only way to see BBCode of a post would be by clicking "edit" (for my own posts) or "quote" for posts from other users. And that's only possible if the topic isn't locked.
I guess the forum database stores posts as BBCode, but that's above my pay grade.
Well one solution is first making a dummy bitcointalk account; to get a post quote that's the template:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=post;quote=POST_NUMBER;topic=TOPIC_NUMBER;sesc=SESSION_TOKEN
after replacing the three fields we get a link where we can get the the content of the textarea html tag which contains the bbcode of the post.
Ofcourse since it's a dummy account it won't have posts so
clicking "edit" (for my own posts)
isn't needed
It seems like a decent amount of work and effort is needed but now that I think of it does the benefits justify it? I don't know
I have enough to do already, but worse: I'd have to check every post one by one, instead of downloading several posts at once from recent. 
That post can be found here. It was scraped a lot later though, so it's not "unedited".
), sometimes I get an 404 error when requesting for example this post, my best guess is that posts prior to a certain certain haven't been archived, is that it? 
