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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

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xefer·

It still requires scrapping to discover the thread ids though does it not?

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We'll have indexes and a catalog view soon.

Are some of the threads not rendered to JSON yet? i.e., do we only get it for new threads?

All of the old threads were rebuilt, so everything should have a JSON representation.

How long did that take? Just the current active threads across the boards, right?

Just a few minutes, since we only store active threads in the database. Was only ~9,000 threads.

That's great news. No hope for a posting API I presume?

Probably not. Since we don't have user accounts, and already have a bit of a spam problem, I'd be pretty worried about what a real POST API might bring.

I figured as much. Just wishful thinking on my part--it'd be nice to be able to build a client wholly atop the API.

It's not like the html form does anything special. Forms don't have funny markup you have to scrape or produce. It's just a POST.

I guess there's mime/url encoding or whatever, but that's hardly an issue.

There's a captcha

What if you charged for it? (Not saying this is a good idea, just that it's an idea.)

Charging for spam just means spammers buy accounts to post spam...

Could end up as a profitable honey pot.

What is the index URL format

Doesn't exist yet. I'll update the API GitHub page once we add it.

Couple things:

Pipes/YQL seems not to have been banned yet, so getting 4chan data back wrapped in a callback for nothing-but-front-end hacks seems doable. Also along those lines: it'd be super-awesome if the API would take ifModifiedSince as a query parameter and not just in headers.

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