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

[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...social_net_green.jpg

http://www.linkerror...ests/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

[housetier]

wow HUGE images!

took my browser a while to cope with them. fascinating nonetheless! Now add a hyperlinked imagemap to the users' profiles

[Gothi[c]]

Told ya

Made the huge images warning a bit more noticeable

[jgpaiva]

Oh man... Those are increbile images.

I'm pretty sure i made some images that i posted on the forum elsewhere that look realy similar to those images (mouser on the top with A LOT of lines coming out into the rest of the small members).

[Gothi[c]]

I'm pretty sure i made some images that i posted on the forum elsewhere that look realy similar to those images (mouser on the top with A LOT of lines coming out into the rest of the small members).

I ran those on a very old database snapshot. It may actually look different now. These old ones actually took a few hours to generate,.. there's alot more posts on the forum now, it would probably take forever to generate now. I need to find something superior to graphviz thats more scalable. Graphviz only runs in 1 process, and thus won't migrate on a cluster. I also can't find a way to seamlessly generate 'parts' of the graph and stitch them together later.
It would be nice to find something that lets us generate/view the graphs on a google-maps like panable-zoomable interface without eating boatloads of memory/cpu

[housetier]

I wonder if Google's Social Graph API can be used for this?

I haven't played with it yet, just saw it somewhere among my feeds a few days ago.

[Gothi[c]]

It seems to me that the google social graph api is not a graphical api but rather one to use google's search data to gather data about how social elements link to eachother.