A tool that scans 19 boards, gathers postings, and posts them where they belong

Background

Postings of the same kind go up on several different boards. To see what appeared where, you have to open each board one by one — with nineteen boards, that means doing it nineteen times. New postings keep appearing, so this work never ends.

What we saw on site

The problem wasn’t the repetition itself — it was that you wouldn’t know if you missed something. While a person works through nineteen boards one at a time, skipping one leaves no trace anywhere. That board’s postings for the day simply never happened.

The problem we defined

Collecting is only half of it. Unless where to publish is also decided, a person has to sort everything again — the repetitive work hasn’t gone away, it has just moved. The scope of the problem was connecting collection and upload in one screen, and making anything missed visible.

What we built

• Collection per board — scans everything, or only a selected category. Start and end pages can be specified to pull just the range you need
• Four separate tallies — total boards, completed boards, discovered postings, and collected postings are counted separately. A single overall progress bar can’t show where something was missed
• Per-board counts — lists how many postings were pulled from each board. If a number looks different from usual, you re-check only that board
• Upload under designated categories — collected postings go to the category you specify, all at once or split by category
• Old data cleanup — deletes collection data older than ten days. Keeping it around slows things down, and holding onto unused data is a burden too

Result

Built and delivered in about two weeks. With a single run it scans all 19 boards and pulls all 318 discovered postings into the designated categories.

Other work built the same way is collected at web data collection.