Has someone written a crawler for the forum? If so, I can help with the ThriftDB setup.

That would be amazing! I think there have been at least a couple crawlers written for it. (One being SearchYC's.) I'll let you know when I find something more concrete.

Is there anything else that would help make the ThriftDB setup go more smoothly?

I don't think so. Once we have the data it'll be easy to upload it. I'm emailing with the SearchYC creator so I'll ask him about arc forum data.

Kartik is happy to contribute his crawler, but wonders if it wouldn't be easiest to reuse the HNSearch crawler (since both forums have the same structure). http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774

Thank you, Andres. I put up a message about it on the Arc Forum as well: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772. Please email me at evanrmurphy@gmail.com if you need assistance.