Over the last decade however with the rise of blogs Forums have lost a little of their popularity. Many people realised the knowledge they where sharing for free could still be provided via blogs, but monetized at the same time and help in building up their own ersonal brand.

Bulletin boards are still around however, and always will be I’m sure. Web Forum Reader is a application designed to help you monitor and track the forums you frequent on a regular basis.

It fairly similar to a RSS reader so if you use one of those on a regular basis you’ll have a pretty good idea how it works.

It’s incredibly easy to add forums to the program, a wizard will take you through the different stages to add them in. It’s very customizable and you can choose exactly what components you would like to insert, for example the last person to post, number of replies etc.

It should work on just about any Internet forum, old and new and really is a must have for anyone who spends a lot of time in bulletin boards. It’s also great for saving bandwidth and speeding up your browsing as you are no longer downloading each page as you go.

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And then there are obfuscated URLs, that have been altered on purpose most of the time to look like a link without providing the functionality of loading a website directly. Many forums do that to avoid that they URL appears as a referrer in the logs of the destination website. Obfuscated links begin with hxxp for instance or variations and there is normally no other way than to copy and paste the url manually.

Quiet URL is a Firefox add-on that automatically converts mistyped or obfuscated URLs. It comes with a predefined ruleset and an editor for custom rulesets that can be added using regular expressions. The add-on converts textual urls, that are strings of text that display a url and that are normally not clickable, into clickable URLs.

So, basically it adds a little comfort to working with Firefox on a regular basis by making all kinds of mistyped or obfuscated URLs clickable in Firefox. One last feature is rather remarkable. URLs can also be obfuscated when posting them in forums. Currently Phpbb, Vbulletin and Invision are supported. It automatically changes http into hxxp if desired.

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Furthermore you need to use a browser to be able to visit the forum as well. Another option that might be suitable for some users would be to use a software that would pull the forum contents and display it in a software that is installed on the computer. This would make it possible to read what has been written on the forum without having to be online or visit the website at all.

Forum Pilot is such a software. It currently supports four bulleting board systems, those are: vBulletin, phpBB, Invision Power Board and Ikonboard. At first start it pulls all bulletin board information and lets the user subscribe to the forums that have been discovered. It is possible to subscribe to one, several or even all of the forums on that website.

The 100 most recent topics are downloaded for each forum by default unless that option is changed in the options. There is no limit on the amount of topics that can be downloaded which means it is possible to download the contents of the complete bulletin board to your computer.

The contents are getting saved in the Application Data folder and could outgrow your hard drive eventually. Just make sure you have enough disk space on that drive to store all the information.

All threads are unread when pulled from the server and are marked read once the user clicks on them. It is possible to open any link in an external browser in case you would like to reply to a topic for instance.

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Forum Pilot

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