Message-ID: <66ba88de@news.ausics.net>
From: not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject: Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...]
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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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