How, Exactly, Do I Put Two and Two Together to Get Four?

[shipitfish]

I am going to deviate from my promised posts about my week in Dallas poker to bring up another issue. For years, I have ignored something I shouldn't have: the Poker Fora on 2+2 Publishing Website.

For many years, I lurked on RGP (rec.gambling.poker). And, in a way that's part of the problem. Usenet died. I mean, it's still there, but it's effectively dead. SPAM problems made it nearly unbearable in the 1990s, and then people who were serious just gave up on it. I spent years on Usenet, and being used to complicated and sophisticated tools to follow the discussions.

I grew up on an Internet that predated web fora, browser interfaces, and the like. I used strn and other tools to read news, and had controllable threading, scored threads, whitelist, blacklists, kill files, and all these things that we in the Free Software world invented over a course of two decades to handle large volume discussions.

Those tools still exist, but the data is locked up in an annoying web form. It feels like being told you have to read a book while someone shakes it in front of you. You have no control of the medium and ability to use the tools at your disposal to filter it.

It's an interesting net.accident that web fora took the place of Usenet. In a way, it got out the rabble, because it became so difficult to participate, you had to really care enough to bother. But, it's tough from my point of view to use knives and bearskins to get a job done.

I think ultimately I'm going to have to write a screen scraper to grok the threads into a mail reader, write some scripts that will auto-post back using WWW::Mechanize in Perl when I “answer” a message, and hope they never change the interface and break my stuff. I've googled around for UBB.Threads hacks, and come up empty.

But, before I dive, I suppose I should ask, particularly of the geek/poker crossover people who read my journal: how the hell do you put up with 2+2's crappy software?