= Forum-Tools "Untangles every thread"

Toolset for analysing forum-data. Currently Hacker News specifically, but a (limited) parser for {the SIOC format}[http://sioc-project.org] is being added.

Forum-Tools is still a bit rough around the edges, but should be working, and be operable by someone with basic Ruby knowledge.

== Usage

You will need Linux or another POSIX based system (Mac) to run the scripts as they are.

The :root_dir in config.rb needs to be set before usage.

The scripts are ran using the runner.rb script, though they can be invoked directly as well.

./runner.rb -l lists all available tasks

./runner.rb -h shows some help-information

=== Important scripts

• config.rb config-settings for all scripts
• networker.rb generates the social networks from .yaml corpus files such as the HN corpus.
• runner.rb runs the other scripts
• sampler.rb allows you to take a subset from the data, such as weekdays, or only the first week
• statter.rb takes various descriptive and other statistics from the yaml data

=== Miscellaneous scripts:

• anonymizer.rb anonymizes the data, which is already done for the HN corpus.
• arrower.rb adds SVG arrows to .svg files created by Gephi. So this script will most often not be used.
• parser.rb parses html files fetched from HN.
• threader.rb generates threads and average karma-ratings for all threads in .json format to be used with the agent-based-forum (see github)

There are also a few libraries in lib, and some R-scripts in the helper_scripts directory.

Gephi, NodeXL and Pajek can be used to open the generated network files (.gexf, .graphml, .net, respectively).

== Copyrights

Forum-Tools and these docs are Copyright (c) 2011 Wybo Wiersma. Forum-Tools is licensed under the {Affero General Public License}[http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html]. These docs are available under the {Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License}[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/].