The British Caving Association

The BCA Forum Scanner
The BCA Forum comprises nearly 20 public boards as well as a number of private ones, which are not publicly listed. The boards receive only sporadic traffic so it can be a nuisance to have to remember to take a look from time to time, to see if there have been any postings. The BCA Forum Scanner does this job for you automatically. It checks the entire Forum every few hours and will notify you by email if any of the forums have received postings. When the scanner detects new posts, it backs off to avoid sending you too many emails when the discussion gets heated. To use this facility, you need to subscribe to the BCA-Forum-Scanner Mailing List at list.bcra.org.uk. The forum scanner software posts the results of its scans to that list, which will then mail the messages to the subscribers. As with all mailing lists, you are responsible for maintaining your own subscription.

Bug reports to d.gibson@bcra.org.uk, please. Also, please note that this software is under development and by subscribing to the service you are accepting that you might be inundated with emails if it goes horribly wrong.

Thanks for getting this running David.

Seems to work pretty well.

Now to start posting, rather than simply monitoring!

Rob

I should probably point out that the Forum Scanner cannot adequately report on private forums. If you receive a message saying that the last posting was ...it means that the posting was to one of the private forums, and the Scanner cannot tell which one, nor who posted. Private forums include BCA and BCRA Councils and the various sub-committees. If this gets annoying, I suppose I could stop the Scanner reporting on private forums altogether.

The forum scanner is still "glitching" from time to time. I'll have to see what I can do about that. The symptom is that you get an email saying

The number of forums has changed since the last time the scan was made (from 17 to 2 forums) so this program cannot make a proper count of the number of new posts.

David Gibson wrote:The forum scanner is still "glitching" from time to time.

It seems to be stable now. I think the glitches are mostly caused each time Cookie makes a change to, e.g., the way the forums are displayed.

Im somewhat surprised at the low number of people who are subscribed to the Forum Scanner. Is that just a reflection of how very, very little traffic there is on the BCA boards; or do people not need a reminder to visit them, or do people use some other method (e.g. some sort of news feed) to be reminded if there are new postings? Ive never managed to get that to work for me.