AlefBet
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Has there been any discussion before about adding RSS feeds to the forum? Lately, I've become enamored of RSS, which allows me to check 8 news sites at once, without having to go to each site individually. I think it would be really convenient to have a feed for each of the public forums. Would it be hard? Do you think it would be worthwhile?

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Mattcrampy
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No actual discussion, but I've been thinking it'd be useful.

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NiroZ
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Apologies for the bump, but I too would like a RSS feed of the forum, should it be feasible. To be honest, even just an RSS feed of 'Todays active posts' would be a nice way to stay in touch with the forum.

I did try some 3rd party feed scrapers, but unsurprisingly they didn't work.

Alneyan
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Hear, hear! Note that it should be possible to get a virtual feed for the forum, if someone feels like "translating" HTML into feed-goodness. A real feed would just be a good deal more convenient, and would actually work for more than one people (I guess you couldn't do much with my Gnus/w3m setup).

Jatopian
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Seems to me there would be so many new items that the only use would be to tell whether a new post has been made, not to read every post.

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Alneyan
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Well, we aren't talking about reading every single comment on Slashdot here. On an average day, there are around five full pages of new messages (check "View messages from the last 24 hours"). That doesn't sound a *lot*, if you are the sort of people who just read everything (I know I glance at most threads at least).

I suspect RSS wouldn't be a radical change, but more like several improvements here and there. Say, it would be more immediate than browsing the "View 24 hours" page, it fits in better for people reading other forums/sites through RSS, it makes it easier to notice new messages, it becomes easier to filter certain forums/threads while still getting the rest of the forums, and so on.

On the other hand, there *is* an option to receive all messages by mail. I know mail doesn't quite fit in with my habits on forums, but that solution may make a RSS feed unnecessary, if there is not enough practical difference between the two. Or perhaps I should just improve my mail setup to properly deal with "mails" from forums...

coppro
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I wouldn't use it (my 100-tab windows are as fast as your feeds woudl ever be), but it's still a good idea.

NiroZ
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Alneyan wrote:
On the other hand, there *is* an option to receive all messages by mail. I know mail doesn't quite fit in with my habits on forums, but that solution may make a RSS feed unnecessary, if there is not enough practical difference between the two. Or perhaps I should just improve my mail setup to properly deal with "mails" from forums...

Yeah, I have thought about that, but other than the fact that the emails can be threaded, RSS would actually be better IMHO. For one, it wouldn't increase Caravel's chances of being marked as junkmail, it would be easier and most likely faster than email to check(at least for me anyway) and from what I have seen, it doesn't look terribly hard to implement and have a site like Feedburner aggregate it, although I am probably wrong.

NiroZ
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anyway, I have managed to create an RSS feed for the site. Unfortunately, its going to be going rather slow due to several factors, one of them being that it is actually an mail to rss converter. Also, due to restrictions of the actual converter, it will only be displaying the last 20 emails for 7 days.

If you want to check it out, you can use the RSS 1.0 feed or the RSS 2.0 feed.

bjozen
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I'am very interested in RSS-Feeds from the DROD Forum!!
The 2 links above don't work... :-(

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[Last edited by bjozen at 05-23-2007 08:08 PM]

Insane
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I tried registering an RSS email feed, which can be subscribed to at feed link and set my current profile's email to the emailing source.

The catch?
I tried sending a normal e-mail via Gmail to it, and despite it working for everybody else, it just doesn't work for me - the news doesn't appear.
It's definitely not the reader, as viewing the feed itself using the site's viewer still shows nothing.

Does anybody have any idea?
-Insane

EDIT: Blast that URL Tag! I tried removing the http from the actual link text itself but it still didn't display correctly..

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[Last edited by Insane at 05-23-2007 09:31 PM]

NiroZ
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IIRC, the email system has been for vital messages only for a while now.

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 05-29-2007 09:57 AM]