feedBulletin

A native, themable, vBulletin-style aggregator for Reddit and the forums that still matter.

feedBulletin is an open-source desktop app that turns your scattered forum-hopping into a single dense, fast, 2012-vBulletin-style index. Reddit subreddits and classic forum RSS feeds (XenForo, vBulletin, Discourse, phpBB, SMF, IPB, Ubiquiti) sit side-by-side in one window — with native rendering, learned-once selectors, avatar enrichment, full-text search, and 17 user-switchable themes that range from a faithful vB4 reproduction to GeoCities, Matrix Rain, MySpace 2006, Bubblegum, and beyond.

Built on Tauri 2 (Rust core) + SvelteKit 5. Runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux as a real desktop app — not a web view in a fancy hat.

Theme gallery

Every interface element resolves through ~60 CSS custom properties; each skin is a single palette swap that propagates across the entire UI. Light and dark variants for all 17 skins; OS-preference followed by default, or pick a mode manually.



vb-classic — 2012 vBulletin v4 default	vb-classic dark — the same, after sundown	myspace-2006 — purple/magenta, Comic Sans

matrix-rain — hacker green-on-black	bubblegum — pastel pinks + lavender	letterpress-paper — NYT/FT broadsheet
		+ 9 more in the picker
geocities-90s — primary chaos	bbs-amber — vintage modem terminal	bbs-green · slashdot-classic · phpbb-prosilver · livejournal-cozy · zine-riot · brutalist-mono · vaporwave · earthtones · tactical-od · blueprint

Pick site-wide via Settings → Theme. Hover any option to preview live across the whole app; click to mark as pending; Save to commit. You can also pin a theme to an individual forum in feeds.yaml (theme: matrix-rain) — that override applies whenever you're inside that forum or any thread it owns.

Native thread rendering with avatar enrichment

feedBulletin doesn't iframe forum threads. The Rust core scrapes each post using per-host learned CSS selectors, then re-renders them in a clean, dense vB4 layout — same author column, avatars, rank, post count, join date, location, and karma every classic forum exposed. The agent learns each new host once on first visit (using your Anthropic API key — see prerequisites below); subsequent visits read from the local cache.

A live thread from r/centuryhomes, rendered natively. Every author has been enriched with avatar (or a deterministic geopattern fallback when the source didn't provide one), rank, post count, join date, karma, and location pulled from the user's profile. Quote blocks resolve to their parent post and clip back to it on click.

Features

One window, ~80 forums. Reddit subs, Reddit user feeds, XenForo, vBulletin, Discourse, phpBB, SMF, IPB, Ubiquiti, generic RSS — all in the vB4 layout you remember.
Native render with learned selectors. Open a thread and read it in the same chrome as the index, with avatars, signatures, quotes, sidebar metadata. No iframes.
Author enrichment. Each unique author's profile is fetched once and patched onto every post they appear in — avatar, rank, post count, join date, location, karma. Cached forever per (host, username).
17 themes, 2 modes each. Site-wide pick lives in localStorage; per-forum override lives in YAML. Hover-to-preview dropdown.
Hot vs New sort where the source supports it (Reddit score, XenForo reply count, Discourse posts).
Full-text search powered by SQLite FTS5 across every poll.
Favorites and history — per-post star, per-thread visit log.
Mark-as-read on visit, with bold-row unread indication.
Keyboard-first navigation. j/k between rows, Enter opens, ⌘+/⌘- zoom, browser-style.
Trackpad pinch zoom and persistent localStorage-backed zoom level.
Visual debugger. When a selector misses, click a button and the Anthropic agent refines against the live DOM. All revisions are versioned in SQLite with undo.
AI Wizard. Converse with the assistant inside Settings to add/remove feeds and theme overrides without hand-editing YAML.
Bundled site profiles. Selectors for e90post.com, garagejournal.com, xdaforums.com, and community.ui.com ship in the binary so your first thread opens without a learner call.

Prerequisites

Anthropic API key (required for new-host learning)

feedBulletin uses Claude to learn each new forum host's selectors the first time you open a thread on it. This is a one-shot per (host, content-type) call; results are cached in SQLite and reused forever. The visual debugger uses the same API to refine selectors when something looks wrong.

The four most-popular hosts ship pre-learned in the binary — first thread on any of those opens without an API call — but anything outside that set will prompt the learner on first visit.

Set the key before launching the app:

# macOS / Linux
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-…"

# Windows (PowerShell)
$env:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "sk-ant-…"

You can use feedBulletin without an API key — the feed-index view, search, favorites, history, and the source-site WebView render all work fine. You just won't get native thread rendering for hosts that aren't already pre-learned. The app degrades gracefully: it falls back to the embedded WebView for any host it can't render natively.

Get an API key at https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys. The learner spends roughly $0.01–0.03 per new host on first visit; refinement passes are in the same ballpark.

Build-time

macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
Windows: Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (Desktop development with C++) + WebView2 runtime (Edge 80+ ships with it)
Linux: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libgtk-3-dev, libsoup-3.0-dev, build essentials. Ubuntu 22.04+ recommended; the AppImage in releases avoids most distro-pinning headaches.
All platforms: Rust 1.78+ (rustup), Node 22+, pnpm 9+.

Install

Pre-built binaries (recommended)

Download the matching installer from the latest release:

Platform	File
macOS (Apple Silicon)	`feedBulletin_<ver>_aarch64.dmg`
macOS (Intel)	`feedBulletin_<ver>_x64.dmg`
Windows x86_64	`feedBulletin_<ver>_x64-setup.exe` (NSIS) or `feedBulletin_<ver>_x64_en-US.msi`
Linux x86_64	`feedBulletin_<ver>_amd64.AppImage` or `feedBulletin_<ver>_amd64.deb`

macOS users: until we sign and notarize, you'll need to right-click → Open the first time to get past Gatekeeper. We're working on it.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/312-dev/feedbulletin.git
cd feedbulletin
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build       # produces a release bundle for your host platform

The artifact lands under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. For day-to-day hacking use pnpm tauri dev instead — it gives you hot reload and a real Rust process.

See DEVELOPMENT.md for platform-specific notes (including the cc-shadowing macOS quirk).

Configuration: `feeds.yaml`

feedBulletin reads feeds.yaml from the project root in dev, or from the platform's app-data directory in production:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.grayada.forumreader/feeds.yaml
Windows: %APPDATA%\com.grayada.forumreader\feeds.yaml
Linux: ~/.config/com.grayada.forumreader/feeds.yaml

Schema

categories:
  - name: <category name>          # required; unique
    forums:
      - kind: <reddit|xenforo|vbulletin|discourse|phpbb|smf|ipb|ubiquiti|generic_rss>
        title: <display name>      # optional; auto-derived if missing
        url: <RSS / JSON feed URL> # required for non-reddit kinds
        sub: <subreddit name>      # reddit-only; mutually exclusive with `user`
        user: <reddit username>    # reddit-only; mutually exclusive with `sub`
        description: <short text>  # optional; shown under the title
        poll_interval_s: 1800      # optional; defaults to 1800 (30 min)
        theme: <skin slug>         # optional; overrides site-wide for this forum
        disabled: false            # optional; defaults to false

Examples

categories:
  - name: BMW & Wrenching
    forums:
      - kind: vbulletin
        title: E90 Post
        url: https://www.e90post.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2
        # No theme set → site-wide pick wins.

      - kind: reddit
        sub: BMW
        theme: tactical-od
        # Any thread opened from this forum will use the tactical-od skin.

  - name: Chicago
    forums:
      - kind: reddit
        sub: chicago
        theme: myspace-2006

      - kind: reddit
        user: spez
        title: u/spez

Available theme slugs

vb-classic, phpbb-prosilver, slashdot-classic, myspace-2006, livejournal-cozy, geocities-90s, bbs-amber, bbs-green, matrix-rain, letterpress-paper, zine-riot, brutalist-mono, vaporwave, earthtones, bubblegum, tactical-od, blueprint.

Each has a built-in light and dark palette; current mode is shared across all skins.

Best practices

poll_interval_s ≥ 60. Most forums rate-limit aggressively below 1 minute; many will start returning 403 / 429 after a few aggressive pulls. The default 1800 (30 min) is what we run with in production. Reddit is the harshest: don't drop below 300.
Use disabled: true to mute, don't delete. A deleted entry is pruned from the DB on next start; a disabled entry stays in place so re-enabling it doesn't lose your read state.
One title per category. Titles must be unique within a category (it's the DB upsert key).
Reddit Accept header is exact. If you're proxying through anything that adds an Accept: application/rss+xml header, Reddit will return 403. Don't.
Cloudflare-protected forums (LTHForum is the classic) will respond 403 to the Rust HTTP client regardless of UA. They show up in the index with a status pill explaining what happened.

The Settings page validates feeds.yaml live — errors block save, warnings don't. You must restart feedBulletin after editing feeds.yaml for poller changes to take effect (the AI Wizard does this for you).

Logs / troubleshooting

feedBulletin writes a debug-level log to a daily-rotating file in your app-data directory, with 24-hour retention (files older than 24h are deleted on the next startup). Useful for diagnosing scrape misses, profile- learner output, or "why is this avatar broken":

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.grayada.forumreader/logs/feedbulletin.log.<YYYY-MM-DD>
Windows: %APPDATA%\com.grayada.forumreader\logs\feedbulletin.log.<YYYY-MM-DD>
Linux: ~/.config/com.grayada.forumreader/logs/feedbulletin.log.<YYYY-MM-DD>

Override the default filter (debug for our code, warn for noisy deps) with the standard RUST_LOG env var when launching from a terminal:

RUST_LOG=trace,sqlx=warn /Applications/feedBulletin.app/Contents/MacOS/forum-reader

Documentation

DEVELOPMENT.md — local dev setup, platform quirks
CONTRIBUTING.md — how to contribute, branch strategy, PR policy
SECURITY.md — how to report vulnerabilities
src-tauri/src/scrape/seed_profiles/ — the bundled site profiles (one MD per host) and how to add your own

License

MIT. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

Acknowledgements

The Tauri team for making it actually pleasant to ship Rust desktop apps.
The classic-forum culture this is a love letter to — vBulletin, XenForo, phpBB, BBS communities, the lot.
Anthropic for the Claude API that powers the selector learner.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 11 Commits
.github		.github
.vscode		.vscode
e2e		e2e
src-tauri		src-tauri
src		src
static		static
.envrc		.envrc
.gitignore		.gitignore
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
DEVELOPMENT.md		DEVELOPMENT.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
SECURITY.md		SECURITY.md
feeds.yaml		feeds.yaml
package.json		package.json
playwright-screenshot.config.ts		playwright-screenshot.config.ts
playwright.config.ts		playwright.config.ts
pnpm-lock.yaml		pnpm-lock.yaml
svelte.config.js		svelte.config.js
tsconfig.json		tsconfig.json
vite.config.js		vite.config.js
vitest.config.ts		vitest.config.ts

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feedBulletin

Theme gallery

Native thread rendering with avatar enrichment

Features

Prerequisites

Anthropic API key (required for new-host learning)

Build-time

Install

Pre-built binaries (recommended)

Build from source

Configuration: `feeds.yaml`

Schema

Examples

Available theme slugs

Best practices

Logs / troubleshooting

Documentation

License

Acknowledgements

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feedBulletin

Theme gallery

Native thread rendering with avatar enrichment

Features

Prerequisites

Anthropic API key (required for new-host learning)

Build-time

Install

Pre-built binaries (recommended)

Build from source

Configuration: feeds.yaml

Schema

Examples

Available theme slugs

Best practices

Logs / troubleshooting

Documentation

License

Acknowledgements

About

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License

Contributing

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