You should see something similar to the screen shot below. Just ad .json to the end of discourse links. Is that what you’re seeing?
Yes. Is it like reddit?
if you add .json to the end of reddit links you will get the same thing. It’s a way to pragmatically interact with the information on the website.
for instance I will use this data at the end of the meme contest. It will allow me to grab a quick snapshot of all the current posts and the number of likes each post had. Then I can have it create a table for me to read through. This way I don’t have to worry about results changing if I tried to manually count them at the deadline.
That’s just one small example, but it opens up so many other ways to interact with the information on the forum. I have some other ideas that may prove to be useful now that I know this exists.
Ah. I see what you mean. I thought there is a plug-in that can format this json form to a human-friendly page that looks like reddit.
oh, no. sorry 
But using that json we could certainly make one! In fact all the topics could be automatically reposted to reddit. Lots of neat stuff can be done.
Automatically reposting the topics to reddit might lead to some confusion, but it would serve as backup in case this forum were not accessible:
I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s not something I would implement. Was just giving another idea of how flexible this is
It might be a bad idea to replicate the topics into the http://www.reddit.com/r/NuBits/ reddit.
But I really don’t like this forum to be a kind of single point of failure for discussion.
Maybe there are better ideas than reposting the topics to reddit (even if there were a separate subreddit for that).
Anyway, a feasible backup in terms of place where to discuss in case this forum fails, would be great.
Maybe a /r/discussnubits isn’t a bad idea where we can just automatically repost all posting there for backup. Something to surely consider!
Why not. There might once be better ideas. But for now I’m grateful for everything that looks like a step forward 
How about using the json format to scrape motions and custodian proposals to a separate client specifically for those? Conversely, the client could allow for the creation of motions and proposals and then post them here in a specific format so they are easily recognisable. (Is there a posting API?).
I think I might have just found a new project!
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You are hooked at NuBits, hm?
And once more it is the right time to cross link to this post:
When I mentioned that there are other use cases I was thinking about this exact thing
I think you’ve created a far superior implementation than I was thinking though by maybe using a client. Maybe it could automatically post to reddit, discourse twitter at the same time?
I was thinking about scraping the info directly from a topic post but that would require proposals always use some format that I can assume will exist. or maybe I could operate under the assumption that if there’s a hash in a topic that has “proposal” in the topic name I can immediately associate the link to that topic with the hash. if there’s no address in the topic I can assume it’s not a custodian or motion proposal. I have a little status website I built that shows all the custodian votes. I wanted to make it so I could click on the custodian address and it would show me what the purposes of that address is.
I’d like to see a client or website that could allow people to post in a specific format. That would make things a lot easier for people to scrape the data and intemperate it properly.
Like where this thread ended up, there needs to be more discussion about datafeeds and APIs and their applications I think as they will be very important for the NuBits ecosystem. Will make another post on this one soon.
For the motions and custodial grant it can be as simple as a Google doc, PDF form or web form posted on a website. Maybe there are even better options out there.
Hope we can start with an RSS feed though Thanks Ben.
So apparently rss was added and enabled by default
http://discuss.nubits.com/latest.rss
It appears to work just like json. If you just want rss from a specific category add .rss to the end of the category name.
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@Ben, thanks for that link to the API. I’ll be having a read through to see what can be done.
@masterOfDisaster, I’m all for desrever’s suggestion of a bounty program. I’m having bits of ideas all the time and, you’re right, I’m hooked on Nu. I must say too that the Nu community is a generous one. I received several donations to the NuBippy address so thanks to everyone who did that.
I’m thinking around the idea of a ‘Shareholder’ client, I think there’s a few things that could be useful. I will probably stick with Python and Kivy (as used with NuBippy) as it’s what I know and can also be coss compiled for all operatingsystems including Android and iOS. I think it would be quite cool to have a mobile client that can update with motions and proposals on the move. Just need to iron out some of the finer points of the architecture and then I’ll knock up a prototype to see what people think. Watch this space…
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In case people wonder what you can do with RSS feeds:
I’m using http://ustart.org to have a dashboard with headlines for the latest news headlines with tabs for crypto, other financial websites and local news. Part of my crypto tab now looks like this after adding the new RSS feed:
The latest NuBits and Peercoin headlines (posts) in one view. Click on it and you are linked to the thread. Awesome, isn’t it?
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I had a read through the API documentation provided by @Ben. There is a bit of a security hole in it at the moment. The only API key that can be generated is a ‘master’ one which seems to have Super-Admin privileges. Seems a bit risky to create an app that has those sorts of permissions when all I want to do is post to the forum occasionally.
The API is in line for updating though so hopefully a less risky way of interacting with it will come. Until then I’ll leave out the re-posting of correctly formatted motions and proposals back here.
I do like the idea of using reddit posts and tweets as a data-store though. My current thinking is to scrape this forum using the json interface, identify motions and proposals (somehow), reformat them into a standard format and then post to reddit / tweet them.
It’s something to get started with anyway.
@woolly_sammoth - We could also write our own Discourse plugins to do it. The RSS feed permissions limiting could be handled in one plugin, and we could add a second plugin that introduces a new type of input form with extra metadata that is used to identify a new class of posts called “proposal”.
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