Hey all,

Someone asked me this question a while ago, I've been puzzling over how it would be possible to achieve it and have come to the conclusion that I wont be able to figure this out without getting some input from people.
We all know that there are many different types of forum (like vBulletin and IPB), now if you was to try and make an application that was to go through a forum and create a list of all the threads you would have to do some code that would parse the HTML of the page and this would have to be written for each of the different types of forum.
Can you guys think of any way of creating an application that could be generic enough that you could add a new config file and then the application could read a different format. Obviously it would be possible to use RSS but that sort of defeats the purpose of this intellectual exercise.

As I mentioned before this is more of an intellectual exercise than me actually trying to create something so if people say it can't be done then I'll accept that.

Thanks for any thoughts you guys may have on how the above scenario could be achieved.

Satal