This functionality is available to professional users and above.

 

The "Hypertext Transfer Protocol" is the most common protocol on the web. "Hypertext" refers to the built-in support for clickable links that take you to other webpages.

 

QDL uses this protocol to import data from other webpages. If you select this protocol and submit the metadata, QDL will fetch the webpage, sanitize it, and store it in the QDL database. Subsequently, you can click the Refresh option in the Action Menu to get QDL to re-import the data, if you suspect that the QDL cache is stale.

 

Four distinct type of sites are recognized.

• mediawiki
  • This is the open-source software used by Wikipedia, and which is used by a lot of other sites as well.
  • These pages have the navbar removed, a standard Wikipedia banner inserted, and sub-sections will be put into collapsable containers, as if they were QDL sub-pages.
  • Sample Wiki Page

  • See Importing Wikipedia Pages for step-by-step instructions.
• phpbb3
  • This is an open-source bulletin board that is extremely popular.
  • Threads will be converted to looking like QDL threads.
  • Sample phpbb Page

  • See Importing a Forum Thread for step-by-step instructions.
• vbulletin
  • This is a proprietary bulletin board that is also extremely popular.
  • Threads will be converted to looking like QDL threads.
  • Sample vBulletin Page

  • See Importing a Forum Thread for step-by-step instructions.
• rss
  • This is the same information that you'd get if you used an RSS feed reader to access a website, but the contents are cached in the QDL record. This makes them searchable.
  • Sample RSS Feed

If the page isn't in one of those formats, the webpage is simply imported as-is, with a bit of sanitizing (including the elimination of JavaScripts which probably wouldn't work anyway).