Re: Read certain forums with Gnus (Canopus)

[Michael Widerkrantz <mc@hack.org>]

Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net> writes:

> I think it is possible using W3 and the nnweb interface - I have not
> looked into neither but the forums are web based and not very
> obfuscated. The problem is that the design of the forum differ from
> place to place so if there are three forums forum.x.com,
> www.y.com/forums and foobar.z.com/chat, there is a risk we need to
> make nnforumsX, nnforumsY, and nnforumsZ. Even of all use UBBTHreads
> or phpthread (or whatever the other larger project is called).

In general, I agree with you about the horridness of web forums, but
there are better ways of getting at them then web scraping: Many of
these forums are based on some database. If you can get permission to
access the database in a more direct way, you can throw together an
NNTP gateway.

There's a pretty nice framework known as Papercut to help you do
this. It's written in Python and fairly easy to work with. I once did
a plugin to it to access Gnuheter, the Swedish free software news
site. My plugin worked last I tested it, but that, I'm afraid was some
time ago. What I did is here:

  http://hack.org/mc/hacks/papercut-gnuheter-1.1.tar.gz

-- 
M.C. Widerkrantz, http://hack.org/mc/
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. ERASE IS BACKSPACE.