  We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions
on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic
mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics,
visualizing the topics as an expression cloud and exploring their temporal
evolution. The underlying social network of users is simultaneously constructed
using the citation relations between users and visualized as a graph structure.
Our platform addresses the issues of the diversity and dynamics of structures
of webpages hosting the forums by implementing a parser architecture that is
independent of the HTML structure of webpages. This allows easy on-the-fly
adding of new websites. Two types of users are targeted: end users who seek to
study the discussed topics and their temporal evolution, and researchers in
need of establishing a forum benchmark dataset and comparing the performances
of analysis tools.
