Searching for text strings in forum threads

What I’m attempting to do is to use DA’s crawler feature to search for text strings in forum threads. There are a few computer graphics forums which I frequent, and I’d like to be able to enter either the url to the forums, or the individual urls to the specific forum sections which I am interested in, and then search the threads within the forum/sections for specific words etc.

Is this possible in DA as a normal crawler search, or do I need to use something like the "crawlerQuery" function to do this? Please also see my post here

David

PS. If this cannot be done yet, then it would be really useful to me to have this facility in a future version 8)

Depends on the website. If search terms are encoded inside the URL (e.g. have a look at the "Song Lyrics" crawlers), then it’s possible to access them using the crawler. But if websites use HTTP posts to transfer search forms, then the crawler can’t access the search functionality of those sites (and therefore this would require a plugin as plugins are more flexible).

But of course you could add URLs to forum threads and scan those pages without accessing the search functionality of those forums.

Thanks, I’ll take a look at that. It would be great if DA could be provided with a plugin/crawler url to allow users to use the application to string search in all the DEVONtechnologies User Forum threads, even if other forums cannot be searched. This would be a real bonus to users.

David

Thanks for the suggestion - we’ll consider this :wink: The only problem at the moment is that we want plugins to be "faceless" but the forum requires a login. Maybe we’ll enable guest access or we’ll use a "dummy user" to scan the forum.

Note:
I’ve reenabled guest access but guests are only allowed to read and not to post. Therefore a "Forum" plugin will be added to the next release of DA  ;)

Very cool, guys.  That will be very useful.
8)

That’s terrific  :)

Thanks very much.

David