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.
