Are there software tools for analysing forum threads?

[Cabd]

I should mention all of this analysis is being done using the free Power BI tool from Microsoft: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/

Using the "Web source" function and the "Word Cloud 2.0" visual.

And a bunch of Powerquery M under the hood to strip the HTML tags and assign alignments.

[Gamma Emerald]

Does this data make you feel like you can solve morph's alignment in a third game with a very high rate of success?

with those 2 games, hell no. But meta is ever-growing.

[Cabd]

Do you think MORE game data put in to these models would have helped?

[Gamma Emerald]

Potentially.

[Cabd]

Well, once the API releases and doing this doesn't kill the site with traffic, I'll release the source code publicly and people can try it out themselves.

I don't think it's going to change much!

[fferyllt]

There's so much more to meta-ing.

Some additional text features would probably increase the gain.

[tn5421]

The software can only respond with what it knows. If you haven't painstakingly scanned every, say, Cabd game, the script may not have enough information to come to any meaningful conclusion.

I'm in favor of scripts that put the information in front of you and leave it to you to analyze it. I'm not in favor of scripts that do a lot of that analyzing for you.

What makes you think that you can't simply adjust script to require just minimal effort to scan all games of a person?

This behavior would cause the script to heavily troll the forum for games they are in, which would most likely result in negative consequences being applied, such as a rate limit or even temporary ban, if not implemented carefully.

@Cabd: I'm not going to argue the merits of automated data collection vs manual data collection. I think the pain point is whether or not a script does automated analysis for you.

And, as fferyllt said, there is so much more to properly meta-diving someone than their word choices.

Edit: Automated scripts that IIoA are fine. Automated scripts that analyze more than bare/superficially are not fine.
Example: A word cloud script that shows a users top x used words as town, scum, and this game all together would be fine.
A word cloud script that highlights words for you in the 'this game' cloud with red / green colors is walking the line (A script that lets you manually do this/doesn't automatically do this for you is probably fine)

[DenzelNoup]

I think it's considered bad sportsmanship