Is there a *good* way to get community data?

[jducoeur]

Technical question for those who know LJ better than I: is there an appropriate way for outside programs to get at your communities? There are well-established pages for fetching flists and interests, but I'm not finding anything comparable for communities. This is stuff I'd like to pull into CommYou -- you should be able to hold a conversation "in" one of your communities -- but I'm not finding a way to fetch the list short of scraping your profile page...

ETA: Okay, found it. What I need is to add the "comm=1" flag to the fdata.bml call. This is documented, but not on the page where I had originally been looking...

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

It's not clear what you want to get: Community interests should be easy, and the communities that someone is in should be available through the Friends List APIs with a special flag that lists what type of account it is ("[scalar](required) The type of journal the friend item is. This value can be one of 'community', 'syndicated', 'news', 'shared', or identity (I), depending on the journaltype of the account in question. The account is a normal personal account when this value is not sent.").

Can you be more specific?

[jducoeur]

Simply put, I'm trying to get the names of the communities that a specified user belongs to, same as you can get from the Profile page. It's easy to get the names of friends (fdata.bml) or interests (interestdata.bml), but I'm not finding a cognate for communities.

Going through the APIs is very sub-optimal, because that requires login access. (Right? I could be misunderstanding.) So far, I'm managing to avoid requiring that you provide your password to CommYou: I'm using OpenID for authentication, and otherwise just using publically-accessible data. I *can* get the info I want by screen-scraping the Profile page, but I think of that as a fallback position.

Annnnd -- nevermind. As I was writing this response, it led me down the path of thinking, "Wait -- fdata is coming from the same data sources as the profile. Can it be coerced into giving me the info I want?" And after much digging around, I finally found the insufficiently documented "comm=1" flag, which seems to do exactly what I need...