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.

Apologies for the number of test messages this morning. I think the problem with the scanner has been solved, but Time Will Tell.

The scanner uses a crude "data mining" operation to detect news posts. In other words, it does not run "internally" on the BCA web server, where it could access the database of posts; instead, it runs "externally" and simply reads the publicly viewable home page and then "mines" the page for the data it needs. What happened this morning was that the forum administrator changed the way the forum is presented to non-logged-in guests and so my software, looking for particular cues in the HTML text, couldnt find the data it needed. I think that's been solved now ... until the next time there is a configuration change or upgrade.

As a separate issue... Because the Forum Scanner simply analyses the publicly viewable home page, it cannot see details of the several private forums on the site. All it knows is how many postings there have been to them. Recently, there have been quite a few postings to one particular private forum, but the Forum Scanner cannot ascertain the details, which is why you may receive a message along the lines of "there's been an update but Im not going to tell you what it is". Clearly, such messages are not particularly helpful unless you happen to be a member of a private forum. I'll keep this under review and, if it seems desirable, I'll modify the way the scanner reports on private forum postings.

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.