I’ve been working on a small GTK desktop app called Forum Scout. It lets you search across multiple Arch-based Linux forums at once — EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Mabox, Garuda and a few others — and shows results in one list.
What it does:
Search multiple forums in one go
Click a column header to sort results
Save results to bookmarks
Search history with one-click re-run
Toggle the forum selector to free up space for results
The plan is to get it into the AUR, but I want a bit more real-world testing and feedback before that. Installation right now is straightforward — just clone and run install.sh.
Would love to hear if it works on your setup, and any thoughts on what’s missing or what could be better.
I maintain a little forum, and I actively fight all kind of bots and scrapers and automatical stuff in my forum. It is MY forum, MY decision. So, to answer your question: Out of courtesy.
Forum Scout uses the official public APIs — Discourse’s /search.json and the MediaWiki JSON API.
It behaves like a user doing a manual search, one request per forum per query, nothing automated or recurring.
That said, the previous version was sending a generic browser User-Agent, which I just fixed.
It now identifies itself as forum-scout/0.2.0 with a link to the repo, so forum admins can see exactly what’s hitting their search endpoint.
Nope. Never was, and nowadays it is WAY worse. Not long after the creation of robots.txt a certain company started to do evil things, and with google leading the pack other followed. AI-Scrapers completely shit on every rules out there.
For context @Ben, @joekamprad was addressing a concern raised about whether permission ought to be sought from forum operators before rolling something like Forum-Scout out.
It wasn’t a question of “the point” of it, rather he was asserting that it’s free to do that.
I think this is a valuable tool since I really get the weird glitches sometimes, so rare no one’s ever seen it. If I could aggregate/isolate across arch forum it would be interesting
That’s exactly one of the reasons why I developed forum-scout!
Those rare, obscure glitches that maybe 3 people in the world have hit — forum-scout searches all the major Arch-based forums simultaneously via their native APIs (Mabox, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, CachyOS, Garuda, RebornOS, Arch Wiki and now KDE and GNOME too).
One search, all results sorted by date.
No Google, no ranking magic — just direct hits from the communities most likely to have seen your weird glitch.
Not only that, but just a few minutes after I went into a discussion about GTK vs Qt… the Qt version was released (though at the time of writing didn’t appear in AUR, easily built using the pkgbuild though).
