Is it possible to use the API to *start* new discussions and add responses, or at this point is it only for retrieving information from a Vanilla installation?
Currently the api only accepts read requests, so you can only get discussions and comments and not submit your own. It would be nice to have an api that allowed write requests however this is a little more tricky due to authentication. I would imagine why this hasn't been implemented already.
I'm not sure but i guess the plan is to provide a full api at some point and use something like oAuth to authenticate requests. (What twitter uses)
Perhaps the name "API" should be changed to "VIEW" for now, because it is confusing a lot of people? It is certainly not an API, any more than an RSS feed is an API. It's all great stuff, but it only results in disappointment when people find out it is not actually what it says it is.
It is exactly an API though, the fact that the data flow is only in one direction is irrelevant. In the same way using an API to get currency converter rates is also one direction flow of data. Admittedly it has very little use, i only have one use for it but i doubt vanilla forums would appreciate me making so many requests to their api to scrape a whole load of data. (If you don't mind let me know, was going to extract some statistics).
Comments
I'm not sure but i guess the plan is to provide a full api at some point and use something like oAuth to authenticate requests. (What twitter uses)