Posted October 13, 2015
high rated
v3: A wild idea mrkgnao, but what would it take for your GOG Rover to start collecting usable intelligence about forum and game reviews? Let me expound.
If only once a day, your little crawler could scan the forum for topics modified since last visit, which would include only new posts, not edits of previously made ones, since the point would be not to index the contents but links to individual messages alongside their authors' credentials. Purpose of this would be to finally have complete list of certain member's posts with their hyperlinks and possibly date when they were created. Also, first posts in the thread, ie. starting a topic, could be distinguished by color and label from others.
In the same way, list of reviews for a certain game and user could be mapped, a task of much smaller proportions.
I know it is gargantuous enterprise but it should be noted that once everything would be set in motion, your faithful servant would work laboriously until everything is indexed for the first time, but then it would be a matter of archiving incomparably smaller number of links daily.
Now, don't get me wrong, we all love your pet, but it seems bored by the same routine and a little variety would prove nothing but beneficial, don't you think?
I have thought about the first one (forum) quite a while ago and even thought of a name for such a tool (DeMagog), but I'm afraid there's a technical issue. GOG limits the number of accesses a user can make to some regions of the website, locking the user's IP for 18 hours if that unpublished limit is reached. The regions triggering such a lock are one's library and the forums. Even nowadays MaGog occasionally triggers the lock. So I'm afraid even the small daily amount you're suggesting is likely to push MaGog well beyond the limit. If only once a day, your little crawler could scan the forum for topics modified since last visit, which would include only new posts, not edits of previously made ones, since the point would be not to index the contents but links to individual messages alongside their authors' credentials. Purpose of this would be to finally have complete list of certain member's posts with their hyperlinks and possibly date when they were created. Also, first posts in the thread, ie. starting a topic, could be distinguished by color and label from others.
In the same way, list of reviews for a certain game and user could be mapped, a task of much smaller proportions.
I know it is gargantuous enterprise but it should be noted that once everything would be set in motion, your faithful servant would work laboriously until everything is indexed for the first time, but then it would be a matter of archiving incomparably smaller number of links daily.
Now, don't get me wrong, we all love your pet, but it seems bored by the same routine and a little variety would prove nothing but beneficial, don't you think?
I don't think that accessing reviews suffers from the same limitation (at least I hope not, never tried), but I'm not sure I can see the great need for such a tool, which will be quite separate from MaGog, as it will probably be indexed by users, not by games. Nevertheless, I'll add it to my todo list (or actually my tothink list), although at the moment I won't give it a high priority.
If you can come up with useful scenarios, I'd appreciate some examples.
Post edited October 13, 2015 by mrkgnao