(10-14-2016 12:01 PM)Lyric Wrote:  As a developer myself who's interested in natural language processing, I'd love to see a developer API for this board to obtain publically-available data through an established interface to assist with research and/or allow others (such as myself) to layer third-party services on the forum that could expand the user experience (for example, combine sentiment analysis and topic modeling to automatically take the "pulse" of a particular fan base on a per-topic basis and visualize how the mood changes over time, and make it available to share for all users. The possibilities are endless).

I could do that, but man it'd be way down the list. You'd probably be better off taking an existing web crawler kinda bot (like the ones they use to automatically update statistics/etc for Wikipedia ... and they're written in Python, so they're easy to modify to do just about anything).

But if you do that, please have a "cool off" timer between page requests so you don't abuse the server. If you just gobble down pages as fast as possible and you're NOT a major search engine ... you'll probably eventually get filtered at the firewall level by the server.