How to automate a workflow against these new forums?

[Jochem van Dieten]

With the old forums I had my workflow automated as follows:

1. Download all new messages to a folder per forum.

2. Delete all messages from people in my kill file.

3. Delete all messages from threads in my ignore filter. (This was a

forward looking filter, so if I ignored a thread it did not just kill

the messages downloaded until then, but I would also never see messages

posted in that thread later.)

4. Mark all messages from people in my ignore list as read.

5. Mark all messages containing certain keywords (e.g. "free version" or

"emacs" and "vi") as read.

6. Mark all messages that are a response to a message by me

(identifiable through the References header) as important.

All of this happened automatically in the background before I even

started reading, drastically reducing the noise and allowing me to

prioritize messages that were directed at me and allowing for offline

reading. And of course I had all sorts of hotkeys in my news reader so I

could ignore a thread with just a "k", jump to the next unread message

with a "n", etc.

I have tried to set up something similar in different ways, including

writing against the published webservice APIs for these forums and

against the email feed, but I am getting stuck on the bugs in the forums:

http://jochem.vandieten.net/2009/03/31/the-new-adobe-forums-unfulfilled-potential/

I am wondering whether it is worth the effort to continue doing on that

path when there is no visible commitment from Adobe to fix the bugs in

the email feed or the webservice APIs. Are there any people who have

successfully automated their workflow against these forums to filter and

prioritize messages and people? How did you do so?

Jochem

PS I am not looking for the usual 'I have that problem too' messages, I

am looking for people who have successfully automated their workflow

using similar rules.

--

Jochem van Dieten

http://jochem.vandieten.net/

[Guest]

You are welcome to continue this conversation here also, of course, but I wanted to point people toward a sub-forum that John created where people can gather that want to work out the possibility of creating an AIR app to access the forums in a similar way that NNTP would. That forum is at http://forums.adobe.com/community/air/forum_project I will post a note to the Experts group to make sure they are aware of it also.

[Jochem van Dieten]

LOL

The people who may be interested in developing an AIR app to talk to these forums are interested precisely because they dislike the interface of these forums. They are quite unlikely to organize themselves around these forums, but they will pick something that will have what they want. Most likely a project hosted by RIAForge or Google, with a real mailinglist where email headers behave like they should and messages don't get swallowed by an unpredictable backend. Why would they possibly want to organizing themselves in these forums?

[Jochem van Dieten]

Surely somebody must have done some sort of automation against these forums. Isn't this the kind of question Adobe has asked the contenders before picking a new forum application to replace the forums where we could do this?

Yes, this is a shameless attempt to get back on the first page of this forum. I promise that I will do this only once in this thread.

[Guest]

i'm hoping they scrap this whole lame idea again and bring back the webx guys. pay them to scale the system properly.

[Guest]

or was i just shamelessly bumping you back up the page... 😉