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forum analyzer. Is there such a thing? Techorati for forums.

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urlwolf:
The phpbb 3 thread got me thinking.

The "forumsphere" (invented) is completely untapped. Compared to the blogosphere, of course. Most forums are a mess to search. Google doesn't really index them very well.

I want a tool that can do what techorati does for blogs, but for forums.

I also want some analyses:
Who are the big posters?
How many posts do you need to be considered a regular?
Tags for topics would be great.
Activity history (not only traffic).

At the heart of it, what I want to answer is: Is this forum worth a post? Is it worth becoming a regular? Would posting here solve my question?

Then, one should get a rank of forums for any question I type.

I'm sure you have had the same problem . WHat is the right forum to get an answer to this?

What's the signal to noise ratio?

A meta-search for all forums would be a killer feature, not only an ontology like techorati.

This is actually not that difficult to make. Someone who has read the source for phpBB, SMF, and knows others like vBulletin could do such a thing. Most forums have RSS included. Doing something like techorati tags for forum posts is not crazy.

Thoughts?

Lashiec:
The closest thing to a meta-search site is Omgili, but lacks all the other functions, and it's not well-known. In fact, if it wasn't for being included as an alias with FARR, I wouldn't be aware of its existence.

There's also Big Boards, which compiles some statistics about forums, but it's a bit limited as many forums are not listed there (mostly because of the site focus). So I think it could be an interesting idea, not so sure as how to make it possible.

EDIT1: A search in Google for some information about an unrelated thing unearthed two search engines: WASAlive, which appears to search in forums and blog comments to find out what's hot at the moment (Macbook Air, Tom Cruise and, Brad Renfro?), and BoardReader, this one appears to be quite more interesting, with stats for the things you search, seems more advanced than the other

EDIT2: Rewrote a sentence in the first paragraph a bit, and removed a redundant phrase in EDIT1 :-[

urlwolf:
Great findings Lashiec!

With bigboards, I thought: "Very exhaustive, It's a forum directory, nice stats..." but then I realized it misses hydrogenaudio, donationcoder (those are big!) so it must be really partial. Not exactly a representative sample: more like a list of forums that have installed the bigboards tracker.

by the way, Mouser, maybe you should! dc is one big player.

vegas:
www.boardtracker.com

Gothi[c]:
We've been working on a forum visualization tool for the donationcoder forums.
Some test results (warning, huge images):

http://www.linkerror.com/stuff/forumgraph_tests/social_net_green.jpg

http://www.linkerror.com/stuff/forumgraph_tests/4/socialnet.jpg

Each path is a post. Eg:
If I post in one of mouser's threads there would be a line going from me to mouser.
In the last example, thicker, brighter lines = more posts.

The project is on hold for a bit since we're 1) very involved with other stuff 2) kind of hitting a limit on how much we can do with just graphivz to create the graphs.

It will be released to the public at some point though ;)

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