libconfab is a concept that I intend(ed) to use to build an Android app similar to Tapatalk (www.tapatalk.com). Tapatalk is a great app but suffers from the problem that many/most forum admins seem very reluctant to install the necessary plugins to enable their api to work.
Assuming that the majority of web forums today are running either VBulletin or phpbb, this project aims to solve the above problem by building a robust parser to extract information.
Popular forums that don't run Vbulletin/phpbb could possibly be supported through a plugin/template system.
Currently, the following basic functions are implemented (list may not be up to date):
- Parse forum list ✓ ✓
- Title ✓ x
- Subforums ✓ ✓
- Description ✓ ✓
- URL ✓ x
- Login ✓ x
- Parse topics from a forum ✓ ✓
- Title ✓ ✓
- URL ✓ x
- Parse posts from a topic ✓ x
- Author ✓ x
- Content ✓ x
- Reply to post ✓ x
- Post new topic ✓ x
The main problem that has slowed down development is that a lot of forums use a completely customized frontend template, or forum list. The content beneath these seems mostly the same, but until I can find a way to handle the variety in these, you're stuck with very variable results depending on the site you're trying to parse.