Documentation

What we monitor

6,575 independent forums, followed through 32,647 sources. These are discussion boards no directory lists — phpBB, vBulletin, XenForo, SMF, MyBB, Discourse and Invision installations, often long-running, often not in English.

Coverage is not a fixed list: the registry grows every day, and a board with a few hundred members counts as much as one with a hundred thousand. The public directory shows everything we follow, by topic and by country.

A few open-API sources are added on top: Hacker News, Stack Exchange, GitHub and YouTube.

How often we check

Every board we watch is re-read every four hours. The typical delay between a post appearing and your email is two hours; four in the worst case.

Where a forum publishes a feed, we use it. Where it does not, we read the same pages it already shows search engines — never anything behind a login.

Keyword syntax

A keyword matches the exact phrase, on whole words. “gas” will not fire on “magazine”, and “heat pump” will not surface a discussion quoting “heat” in one sentence and “pump” in another.

• heat pump — the phrase: both words in a row, in that order.
• solar* — the star widens to the start of a word: “solar” also catches “solarpanel”.
• starlink & price — the ampersand looks for both words anywhere in the message, not necessarily side by side.
• fiber optic, insurance claim — a comma separates several keywords: each is followed on its own, and the email tells you which one fired.

Every keyword can carry words to exclude, and be restricted to a country or a language. By default we filter nothing — the best alert often comes from an unexpected forum.

A term returning more than fifty discussions is flagged as too broad rather than poured into your inbox, so a badly chosen word never drowns the others.

Country and language

Filtering by country keeps forums whose country is uncertain, and that is deliberate. Many of the biggest national forums sit on .com addresses: demanding proof of country would hide most of them from you.

A forum's language never tells you its country. A Spanish-speaking board may be Colombian or Argentinian, so we leave the country blank rather than invent one.

How we behave on the forums we read

• No accounts, no logins, nothing behind a paywall or a registration.
• We read and respect each forum's robots.txt.
• We never open two simultaneous requests to the same site. A forum sees two to seven visits a day from us.
• We copy neither pages nor posts: a title, a link to the source, and the opening of the message.
• Our crawler identifies itself and gives an address to have it removed — same day, no questions asked.

What we do not cover

Boards that build their discussion list in the browser rather than serving it as a page.

Sites that block automated readers outright. We do not disguise ourselves to get around it, so those stay out of reach.

Anything private: member areas, closed groups, direct messages.

What you receive

An email, when there is something. Nothing when there is nothing, and never the same discussion twice. Each alert carries the title, the forum, the section, the keyword that fired and a link to the source.

A single mention on a forum that never talks about you is flagged as such: that is often the best moment to step in.