Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...]

Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Web forums keep annoying me more and more with bloated interfaces,
so I'm using them less and less, yet there's less and less to read
on Usenet too. So lately I've been considering, not entirely
seriously, writing a program to scrape specific web forums and
generate a news spool with the content of the forum's latest posts
for me to read (either locally, or perhaps remotely via NNTP).
 
Has anyone done this before? I know there are various web forum
platforms that support NNTP server-side, but I'm talking about web
forums hosted by other people who I have no association or
influence with. Has anyone done something that's purely a
client-side implementation?

 
There's a mobile app called Tapatalk, which hooks into a number of web
forums to make them mobile friendly, including posting.  I think they have
plugins for various platforms like phpBB, which forum operators can install
to get access to their forum from mobiles.  If you see postings on a forum
that include text like 'Sent from my Samsung SM-GT9711QB via Tapatalk' then
that forum is Tapatalk enabled (or was at the time of posting).

Interesting, though I don't think I've ever seen reference to it on any
forum I view regularly so they probably don't have the Tapatalk plug-in
installed.

It's been a decade or more since I looked at it, but thinking was that it
might be possible to hook into the Tapatalk interface and get some kind of
access to the raw forum database, rather than scraping the forum's web page.
 
Tapatalk still seems to be a thing, but use of phpBB and similar forums has
declined.  Maybe they have plugins for Discourse and friends now?
 
Anyway, it might be worth digging into the Tapatalk protocol and seeing if
there's a way to hook into it from outside the Tapatalk ecosystem.  I have
no idea if it's possible.

Looks like it's possible, this PHP lib. has an extensive set of
functions:
https://github.com/netzmacht/tapatalk-client-api

Tapatalk don't support Discourse, but do support the other common
forum platforms I was looking at. It might be interesting if I get
keen enough to set up a Gmane-style news server where other people
can submit forums to be added, but for my own use it doesn't look
like it's installed on the forums I want to watch.

Thanks for the tip though.

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