Ignite

How many of you read more than 10 forums you like to be on top of? If you’re anything like me and have a very scattered hobbies, you more than likely find yourself reading through upwards of 10 forums, the difficulty of this task is directly proportionate to the number of forums you read.

The problem with a lot of web forums is not organised discussions, most decent forums have that under control with heavy handed moderation. The problem is that i have to login to each one individually, i have to browse to each one to see discussion or remember what i said. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep on top of all the forums I want and need to read, so i need a solution.

A desktop application that interfaces with forums would most definitely bridge the gap to a solution, the unfortunate problem with this is it’s rare to find a forum with an API so that the interface can be done. I had an idea of how this may be able to be circumvented, which basically involved training an application into recognising thread links, post counts, etc. from different forum engines inside a browser window and then using that data, to build a tree of the forum.

I did some searching looking for products that may already exist as a desktop application for web forums and came across a company called ChemTable Software. They have tried to work around the API issue in a product called Web Forum Reader much like the way I described a paragraph above, however it doesn’t handle sub-forums and so on automatically, you have to manually create the forum tree. The software works ok, except for the fact it doesn’t automatically map out the forum for you, synchronization of big forums take a long time, so syncing every 30 minutes is really out of the question if you have a lot of forums. Also, due to the way it acquires the data, I find it very hard to trust that it’s capturing all the threads/posts/post counts/updates accurately. I’d be happy to talk in greater detail with anyone about chemtable’s Web Forum Reader.

I can see a lot of people following my thought train and beginning to think that email would solve my solution. Sure, but my email inbox is already full of lots of junk I don’t read and find hard to keep organised, so I don’t want to add more and I want it to stay organised in it’s threads. The next solution? Usenet, an age old proven technique of thick client based forums, is exactly where I was slowly heading with this topic. I’ve been using usenet since I started using the internet for various reasons, I was alerted to it through old internet books from the local library which listed a whole lot of sites like alt.and rec.blah.blah and so on, I logged into my local server and immediately loved it.

It’s seems that with the advent of forums and the web, we’ve taken a bit of a step backwards in how we participate in online discussions. Usenet allows people to bring all their discussions together into one application, even if the discussion groups spanned multiple servers, it allows people to search across multiple groups and sites, other client side features include flagging/categorising threads.

Now, imagine all the wonder of a usenet client, coupled with a great forum back end, not in the traditional ‘post to a usenet server using a usenet gateway for the forum’ kind of way, but where a usenet style server is built to wrap around the existing forum database. So if it exists in the forum, it exists in the server, if you call a post from the server, it asks the forum database for it’s content, you must authenticate against the server using your forum login. The only problem? In usenet posts aren’t associated to threads, threading of discussion is handled on the client side via the subject line, so that would need to become part of this. Oh wait? This just an API for the forum, it looks like we’ve gone full circle.

Invision Power Board has an API available, phpBB has an API availabe, but from what I’ve read they’re not exposed via XMLRPC or anything like that, doing this would go along way to unlocking the forum content and bringing all forums together in one easy to manage application. I think vBulletin may be the only forum with an API available, but once again.. Who’s using it?