Treading the boards

By Mike Davison

At last someone with some clout has championed the lowly message board. Steve is bang on. Innovation in board technology has lagged behind that of blogs - even to the extent that blogs are often been asked to do the job a board is better prepared for. Boardtracker is great although boards themselves need to say hi to the world and start sharing their content. I am talking syndication… again. Everyone wins.

1/ More People (not just those on the board) get to tap into great consumer debate and discussion in full flow.

2/ Webmasters could accrue more in ad revenue due to increased traffic.

I’ve not devised in my head the best model for serving content from communities. Maybe you sign up for tag feeds - ie where a conversation mentions a car or gardening tool you are looking to buy. Just thinking aloud but there’s an application in there somewhere. 

Closing comment - Imagine a blog with a robots.txt file.

Brought into the world on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 and filed under Uncategorized.

  • Cheers. Let us know when you know of boards using your plugin. Its a well needed development and pretty exciting. I still think that as the volume of boards you spider increases, so too will the need for a ping system of some sort, though. Let's hope boards get behind the idea.
    Good work and keep us posted!
  • We do have an api with ping type component for network integration but this is aimed at the large content networks rather than individual boards. A 'traditional' ping system is planned but is not a priority since its not really needed and no boards have requested it.
    The existing spidering mechanism works efficiently since its designed specifically for boards, it will find new threads very quickly and the busier the board the faster we spider it.
    Not sure how many boards use the tags plugin at the moment, there have been quite a few downloads but not many installed or active yet I would think since it was only released recently for phpbb and the vbulletin version will be released in the next day or two hopefully.
  • Thanks BoardTracker. In terms of closer to realtime conversation tracking (or involvement), do you have technology in the pipeline to allow boards ping you after a post has been made rather than waiting to be spidered?
    I love the trackback plugin for boards. Great work but boards seem slow on the uptake. Which boards are using this system?
  • Actually with you can already tag threads through our system after posting plus we provide plugins for boards to allow their users to tag threads when created which we then index also.
    Then we create tag clouds (as you can see on our index page now) and these can be placed on the boards, or any site. The clouds can be set to only display tags from a specific board or for all boards (default).
    As for the tag mod itself, this places the tags above the thread and each tag links to a global tag search on BT but again this can be configured by the board admin to only search tags from their board or even better they can define a group of boards to include in the tag search to faciliate a kind of 'traffic trading'.
    We also have rss feeds for the search on BT which can also be site specific so board admins can easily syndicate their content in various ways.
    We have a load of new and very 'web2.0' type features, tag related and others, on the way so stay tuned for those.
  • As far as I am aware this doesn't exist, except in my head. There are two ways I can see it working, though:
    1/ Posters tag their own content (like bloggers).
    2/ More complex but no reason I can see why a regular expression search implemented by the server after every post (or even every hour) couldn't generate a personal RSS feed for me based on my preferences. It would require more processing power but surely not the stuff of sci fi. Turn it around, you could set you reader to ask for content intermittently so that the server doesn't have to deal with everyone's requests based on a server side rule being met (time reached or post made etc).
  • annoymmous
    could u please tell me how to get a tagboard
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