POTN RSS Feed?

I would love to be able to subscribe to specific forum sections via RSS feed? Any chance of this feature ever making it onto the site?

Not at the moment. The forum does support it but it is not enabled because of performance/resources.

Hi, just found this thread as I was looking for something like it for POTN buy/sell section as well.

I totally understand Pekka's choice. I would like to to point out that RSS may actually reduces bandwidth. People check the feed, if there is nothing that interest them, they don't come to the site.

Also RSS is very efficient as it only sends out what has changed rather than everything. As an admin you can also control history, so if a new subscriber comes onboard do they get the last 50, 100, 500 posts. This can be less than 1 "index page" worth of data.

Just my $0.02.

Haha I'd love a feed just for the Sale forum

aram535 wrote in post #6207057
Hi, just found this thread as I was looking for something like it for POTN buy/sell section as well.

I totally understand Pekka's choice. I would like to to point out that RSS may actually reduces bandwidth. People check the feed, if there is nothing that interest them, they don't come to the site.

Also RSS is very efficient as it only sends out what has changed rather than everything. As an admin you can also control history, so if a new subscriber comes onboard do they get the last 50, 100, 500 posts. This can be less than 1 "index page" worth of data.

Just my $0.02.

Does the expression "sipping from a firehose" ring any bells? You, the RSS viewer, would be flooded and have to visit to see what you missed because the stream was sending out so much info.

i would love to see this forum use a RSS feed. It would be very helpful

vote for the rss (especially the sale forums)

RSS FEED would ROCK. especially on my blackberry

Jon wrote in post #6285968
Does the expression "sipping from a firehose" ring any bells? You, the RSS viewer, would be flooded and have to visit to see what you missed because the stream was sending out so much info.

I believe that the RSS can be setup to only allow the first post of a new topic (in fact I think that is the default configuration), and that subscriptions can be by individual sub-forum only. Thus the RSS reader is only pulling down the new topics for the sub-forums that interest the user.

Considering that the XML content is generated on schedules and cached - it would indeed cut down on some traffic since the RSS articles have a direct link to the thread, so the user load the thread directly, instead of opening the sub-forum first, or worse using the "Whats New" search feature which takes a pretty good hit on the server.

So you'd still have to come back to find out if there was any new activity in existing threads if it only listed new threads, not new activity. At the moment there are 18 threads in EOS alone with action in the past hour, only 2 of which are new. Active threads may get better than a post a minute, at least in spurts.

Jon wrote in post #6947168
So you'd still have to come back to find out if there was any new activity in existing threads if it only listed new threads, not new activity. At the moment there are 18 threads in EOS alone with action in the past hour, only 2 of which are new. Active threads may get better than a post a minute, at least in spurts.

I assume (or would hope!) most users, who upon viewing a thread that they find interesting and want to follow, use the thread subscription so that with a single page load on their USER CP they can see updated threads.

So an example - If I were watching a sub-forum for both NEW threads, and replies to existing threads that 'interest' me it is difficult at best, I have to sort through 4-5 pages per day. So what I would prefer to do is use my RSS feed to watch for new threads that look interesting and pull them up directly, and if I want to follow the thread I either reply or add the thread to my subscriptions so in the future I can use my USER CP to see updates and not sift through the Sub-Forum. The 'end result' at the end of the day is I have avoided about 4 to 10 'forumview' page loads minimum on the server... (and the time it would have normally taken me to look through all the threads to find what interests me)

Please do not misunderstand me, I fully respect whatever the decision is in regards to RSS. I was simply mentioning that vB's RSS implementation typically helps and not hurts both server load and visitor traffic.

I'm raising this thread, to see where we are at on RSS feed support? Browsing this site on my phone is a pain, and having an RSS feed would make things SO much easier.

+1 for RSS on subscribed threads. Would be a nice option!

I believe RSS would help alot. I would use a RSS reader to notify me if a lens is for sale that I want.

For example if I want the canon 70-200 2.8 non-is (which I do) there are programs out there that will search specified rss feeds for keywords and if found will send you a text message (I made a program in college to do this). This way if someone could be notified and buy or sell an item immediately go to the link from there phone and reply to the post instead of loosing out on a deal.

Just my .02

Would love to see a Top Threads of the Day feed.