Latest revision as of 07:43, 25 November 2016

Frequently Asked Questions

The Basics

What is Owl?

Owl is like Outlook for message boards or Tapatalk for the desktop. It provides a single interface for all of your message boards.

What boards work with Owl?

This is a tough question with no simple answer. Our intention is to make Owl work with as many message boards as possible. Currently Owl will work any message boards that use Tapatalk, Xenforo and vBulletin 3.8 or above. However there are exceptions to these since some boards have heavily customized interfaces which may prevent Owl from working.

Which URL should I use to add a message board to Owl?

Most message boards use a path URL. For example, a board may exist at http://www.juot.net but the actual URL for the board is http://www.juot.net/forums. However, in many cases Owl will be able to accept either. If Owl doesn't find a board under the main URL (ie. http://www.juot.net) it will then try a list of the common paths appended to the URL (ie. http://www.juot.net/forums, http://www.juot.net/board, etc).

What do the following errors mean?

"No board could be found"

This message means that Owl could not find any message board it could understand.

"The forum structure of the messageboard could not be determined."

Owl was likely able to log into the board but it was able to get a list of forums and sub-forums. This is often the result of heavy customization of the message board that may make it incompatible with Owl.

"There was an unexpected error while configuring the board"

This can be caused by a poor connection to the Internet or a malfunctioning server.

Tapatalk

If I use a board on Tapatalk can I use it in Owl?

Yes. However a few boards do not install Tapatalk into the standard location. In this case, if you know the exact URL to the mobiquo.php file, then you can enter the full URL and specify the Taptalk parser when adding a new board.

Lua Parsers

Some times username don't show on posts. Why?

On many vBulletin message boards it is not uncommon to decorate a user’s name in the postbit. However, some boards will do this using the <div> tag, but since these decorations fall inside an anchor tag (ie. <a>) this is invalid HTML.

For example, the HTML may be something like:

<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?u=1304"><div class="smallname">blowhard</div></a>

Since Owl uses HTMLTidy to allow for XHTML processing of the HTML, the above snippet will incorrecly be changed to:

<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?u=1304"></a><div class="smallname">blowhard</div>

This causes blank usernames since Owl looks in the <a> element’s value in order to get the username. The solution is for the messageboard to use the <span> element, which is valid HTML. The example above then becomes:

<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?u=1304"><span class="smallname">blowhard</span></a>

And the username is exracted as expected.