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.

Those of you who subscribe to my BCA Forum Scanner will know that its notifications are not always "useful". This is because there is only a limited amount of information that can be gleaned by the "data mining" of public web pages (which is how it works). However, if you are only interested in postings from a small number of forums on the BCA site, there is an alternative - you simply need to "subscribe" to the forums you are interested in. The link to do this is at the bottom of the screen, when you ask to view the topics in any forum. (Problems?: click the FAQ link).

Im pretty sure that the "subscribe" facility didnt used to work properly (which is why I wrote the Forum Scanner) but it now seems to, and is clearly a more helpful solution than this Scanner.

If you want to un-subscribe from the Forum Scanner mailing list, simply send an empty message with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line, to bca-forum-scanner-request@list.bcra.org.uk. If you do that from your subscribed email address I think you can achieve the un-subscription without needing to remember your password. However, if you go to
http://list.bcra.org.uk/mailman/options ... cra.org.uk you will need to click the link to retrieve your password if you cannot remember it.

A reminder...

Those of you who subscribe to my BCA Forum Scanner will know that its notifications are not always "useful". This is because there is only a limited amount of information that can be gleaned by the "data mining" of public web pages (which is how it works). The Scanner cannot tell you anything about the topics in the forums - only that there are new posts.

A more useful facility is available. On any of the forums that you are interested in, simply scroll down to the very bottom of the screen and click on the Subscribe link. Once you have done this, you may want to un-subscribe from the Forum Scanner. to do this, click on the link at the bottom of any email message from the Forum Scanner mailing list.

My BCA Forum Scanner will be decommissioned this afternoon. For information see https://british-caving.org.uk/phpBB3/vi ... =29&t=1194