vB forum front-end?
 

I frequent a number of Web forums (everyone seems to use vB) and takes a lot of time to check subscribed threads or replies to posts I made from every forum. I am wondering if there is a front-end (either downloadable or web based) that can assemble all of the information from my multiple accounts at multiple forums into one place.

Even cooler would be a notification applet for the GNOME panel, but I am guessing that is wishful thinking.

Teach yourself a language like Python or Java (cause they are easier than C) and write one yourself! Both those languages have GNOME bindings and this would be a good way to give back to the community that has given you a heap of free software.

I have thought about how to do that for a while, and I might have the ability to do it (with some help from here of course). Then I realized that anyone running a vB forum could potentially block access to people who used such a program, because in server logs it might not appear that a browser was accessing the site, especially if this program has to find some way to login to the various forums. Any thoughts on this?

They could block it yes, but why would they want to? It wouldn't be hurting anything, you could use something like curl to login via the vB login form and collect any data you wanted. You *could* identify yourself to the site as say, Mozilla Firefox but that may not be playing fair. Do you foresee a particular reason why site owners might want to ban your client? Provided you didn't try to update every second, maybe once every 10 minutes then I don't think you'd get many nasty looks.