By mkinnan on

We are developing a web-based, Drupal-powered, forum aggregator to connect forum owners and forum readers in order to: (1) make it easy for forum readers to subscribe to, quickly access, and search diverse forum content, and (2) increase traffic to forum websites with the intention of increasing forum participation.

Agalanche has a familiar GUI forum interface for topic lists but when a user clicks on a topic title, they are redirected to the actual post on the respective forum. Currently, Agalanche users can subscribe to an entire forum, specific categories of a forum, a specific username, or a specific thread. Users also have the ability to search and sort their personalized feeds.

Aggregators in general typically rely on XML (e.g. RSS feeds) data or web crawling to create an aggregator-like utility, and may do so in a way that violates the terms of service of the website owners. In contrast, we are using a non-traditional approach of aggregation by performing direct (through a database port over SSH) or indirect (using a remote PHP file to transfer CSV files) database querying to collect data with cooperation of the forum owners.

Our approach of using database querying for aggregation has numerous advantages such as greater data accuracy, faster data collection, and greater efficiency, compared to downloading and parsing XML data. The one drawback is that it requires forum owner permission and participation to  query the forum databases. We try to mitigate this by being completely transparent in both the actual PHP file that we ask forum owners to put on their servers, and by intentionally limiting the kinds of information we are allowed to access. This way you know what information we are collecting and can ensure the safety of your database.

We are currently in a beta development state and have been actively aggregating a few forums for the last 6 months while working out the majority of bugs and issues. At this time, we believe Agalanche has reached a stable state that we would like to seek participation and feedback from the Drupal community, especially since Agalanche is built around Drupal.

Right now, we are looking for input from the Drupal community as it relates to:

  1. Do you have a forum you would like to add? We would love to hear from you!
  2. Our approach of using direct and indirect database querying for aggregation.
  3. If you are a forum owner and do not want to add your forum to Agalanche, why? What can we do to change your mind?
  4. Is there something fundamentally wrong with what we are doing?
  5. How can we improve the functionality of Agalanche to make the website easier to use?
  6. How can we make it easier for forum owners to add their forums?

Once we get some more feedback, we plan to write up a more detailed topic on Drupal regarding how we have built Agalanche. We understand that there are numerous forum platforms and many database types, but our current focus is publicly viewable PHP-based forum platforms (specifically Drupal and phpBB) using MySQL databases.

If you have any questions or want to know more about Agalanche, please visit our forums and website. Thanks.

Website: http://beta.agalanche.com

Forums: http://agalanche.com/forum

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

mkinnan’s picture

mkinnan commented

We just recently upgraded Agalanche and can now aggregate from a variety of different forum software. A few other features have been integrated as well. There is also a demo video on our website of how Agalanche works.

One of the things we hope to do for forum owners in the future if Agalanche can be a success is to pay (up to an undetermined amount) your forum hosting bill for one year. We hope that would be a good incentive for forum owners to participate in Agalanche during the beta testing. Your forum would need to be active with member participation and have at least a couple non-spam posts a day.

Thanks for looking!

http://beta.agalanche.com