Silly question : how best to read forum messages

[admin]

You could also use the RSS feed to read the content. That gives a very simple view of the forum and can be read from lots of places, including inside MS Outlook for example, if you wanted to see new posts there or from the Windows gadget sidebar. I sometimes have it in the sidebar on my Windows desktop so I can see new posts coming through without really being on AD.

If anyone did ever try to scrape the whole forum and repost the data as their own, I'd dig deep to sue them.

Admin

[WealdDomains]

Thanks everyone for your replies so far.

I probably used too many words to describe my problem. I'm most interested in the simple navigation from the post I'm reading to the next unread one : clicking a button to "read the next unread message" rather than going back to the list of threads and having to think which thread I want to look at next and manually clicking on it.

The actual order of reading those (whether by thread or sequence number) doesn't matter so much : it would be nice to have the threading, but it's not vital. It's the rapid jumping to new posts (whether new threads or replies to existing threads) that matters. If there are only, say, a hundred or so mildly active posts over the course of a day, then I can remember roughly what is under discussion when I land in the middle.

I'm keen to be able to skim read quickly through all posts I haven't read, with the confidence I have seen all recent replies to earlier posts where I have previously read the question and the initial responses.

I'm definitely not trying to scrape the database, although (in threaded form) the method could help to rapidly browse through several years of interesting material from before I joined.

The Usenet newsreader analogy is a good one. The text-only Lynx browsing experience might well help. I'll have a look at Tapatalk for the Android too. Understanding the URL structure is useful too, although I haven't worked out how to exploit it yet.

Thanks again,
David (old school rather than American !)

[WealdDomains]

Thanks Admin. The RSS idea sounds good. I had a bad experience with using RSS a few months ago, but that was down to the inept way I configured my reader rather than anything else, so perhaps I should try again. The gadget idea is good, but unfortunately wouldn't work for me during the day.

As I was typing into my previous reply while you posted a few minutes ago, I'm not interested in scraping the database.

Thanks,
David

[WealdDomains]

Next question. There seem to be about fifty orange RSS feed links on the home page. Are there RSS feed links for the groupings of subforums or, indeed, one for the forum as a whole ?

Thanks,
David

[WealdDomains]

Thank you everyone. I've been very interested by everyone's replies ... and also surprised by some of the reactions ... and also appalled at the suggestion I might be American - that's worse than being called a potential forum scraper by Admin

I'm now in a hybrid position involving the website itself (10%) and Google Reader (25%) on my PC and a tendency towards ForumRunner (65%) on my Android, although I may well look at Tapatalk too. The website options involving display styles and trees may have more potential than I yet recognise : Forum Runner is clearly in front at the moment, helped by it's intra-day availability at work. Trying to get a clean baseline to see new posts may sadly have lost some interesting posts in the process.

Ah well, chacun à son goût : and no, that's not a plug for a .fr or eu name

David (three-quarters English and a quarter Welsh)

[cc976a]

I might be mis-reading the want but isn't it the Current page on ForumRunner?

This gives a sequential list of all posts in order made irregardless of section of forum.

It's invaluable apart from the error message (reported to Admin) which means it's impossible to post a reply or create a new thread on AcornDomains using ForumRunner

Considering 99% of my use on here is through ForumRunner it is a nuisance for me

[WealdDomains]

Excellent, thank you

David

[Bailey]

irrelevant post - apologies