• Literature on the issue is still arguing whether it is a public domain or not, so to be on the safe side, I decided to let you know. And yes, if I can get @Velocio 's approval for doing this, this will tick one more ethical concern as dealt with.

    @Skülly It's basically spending hours reading posts and comments about bikes and trying to connect them to current theories and other academic research on the topic. It's actually good fun, I'm glad I chose to do it.

  • I am fine with you doing this on the proviso that:

    1. Any bot/scraper that you use to do this only crawls public information (no using cookies to try and fake being a user) - similarly any information you publish comes from the public information (available when you're signed out)
    2. You respect a reasonable crawl rate of no more than 0.5rps (30 requests per minute... a deep crawl is going to hit a lot of uncached content and result in a lot of computation on my end).

    Note: If you're configuring a crawler, stick to /conversations and exclude /comments as the latter provides a permalink location for information already render in the former.

    If you're not using a crawler... and if you're doing this as a manual ethnographical study, you'll want to spend most of your time in the Current Projects forum (which is all public and you wouldn't have to worry about permissions).

    Finally... I've got to ask, I always thought modern ethnography involved face-to-face discourse with those who are the subject of the study... but in this case you want to divine understanding from reading alone? Are you later looking to conduct interviews once you have a theory to support?

  • This is great, thank you!

    I am doing it manually so not using bots or scrapers. And yes, Current Projects is definitely a gem. Actually, I firstly did interviews with people who I can get hold of and I am using netnography to either support or contradict what they said. Since most of my sample were people who have already purchased one, I am looking on forums and social media to find out what people who are willing to purchase think too.

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