RSS/Atom feeds

Hi

Has anyone [moderators] every considered adding RSS or Atom feeds to these forums? They would make it easier, for me anyway, to keep up with posts rather than relying on email or frequent page refreshes.

Eric

Eric,
I think we're limited to what the BBS software provides.
I usually use the link on the top right side of the main forum page: "View posts since last visit", and then click on the little bookmark link to the left of the topic title (which takes you to the newest post you haven't read on that thread).

I do this in Firefox and Ctrl-click on them to open up each thread in a separate tab window.

HTH!
Matt

This also works with IE7.

Dan

There are some MOD's (?) that make RSS/Atom feeds available. See and example here

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=254606

We are under the constraints of the software but I think this would be really useful. Who administers the BBS software used for these forums?

We have a phpBB powered forum that allows RRS feeds. Don't ask me how - that's what I keep my OH for

There is information here

http://www.outshine.com/blog/2007/03/phpbb-rss-mods.php

that can help someone make it so. Feeds make it so much easier to navigate forums so I hope someone is reading

Will hope for the best.

Could I add my vote for RSS feeds please?

I aggregate all of my forum browsing through Google Reader for easy access from my iPhone, and an RSS feed would make it so much easier to browse through to threads that interest me. Even better would be a seperate feed for each sub-forum. Lots of forums have a similar feature.

Thanks for your consideration!

Help Here chaps please, sorry if I sound dull. What are "adding RSS or Atom feeds" please, appreciated a simple explanation - thank you.

Hi Everyone,

This was brought to our attention this morning via a report. I was just wondering what exactly would you guys like RSS feeds of?

This is just my opinion but others I'm sure will voice theirs as well.

I think we should have a feed of every forum and the feed should contain all the entries in the first page. Most importantly, it would be nice to have the the individual feed items retain the main topic title and the summary of the individual feed item should be the comment submitted. This way one would not have to necessarily visit the forum via a browser unless they wanted to comment say.

It also makes it easier to monitor multiple forums simultaneously.

Feeds of Recent Activity, Latest Topics etc would also be useful to others as a one way stopgap.

Woohoo this is great news!

My personal vote would be for one feed for each sub-forum (General Chat, Lenses, Competitions, etc). In my experience the conventional approach is to have one RSS entry for each new post in that forum. Some forums add a new RSS entry for every reply, but I think that can cause overload (for example mflenses.com's feed)

A bonus feature which you don't see often (and would be incredibly handy!) would be if the RSS entry publish date would update whenever there was a new reply. This would make it float to the top of the entries list again in most peoples' aggregators.

And please please please, FULL FEEDS! Or at the very least a couple hundred words, not just the topic title

I personally wouldn't have any objection to adverts in the feed.

Thanks very much for looking into this!

Now that we are on our own custom platform we can practically do anything, its just the case of what is the best approach. Don't want to build anything that no-one will find useful.

Personally I wouldn't use RSS feeds.
Slightly OT, one thing though I really could do with is an improvement to the "New Posts" page.

If I've been away for a while there can be loads and loads of pages to roam through - often more than I can handle in one sitting Either some way of bookmarking the current set (i.e. an "I haven't finished" link), or a way of finding all posts that have been updated since a certain date.

Either of those options would be hugely useful

Matt

Agreed, but for a different reason. If the broadband connection goes down then I lose all the green markers for unread posts, and that's a nightmare.

It doesn't happen very often, but if it never happened that would be better!

Can I also add my vote for an RSS feed to be available for each of the sub forums please? I aggregate all my feeds in my mail software - MS Outlook which means I can pick up my mail and RSS posts at any time I like via PC or phone. It's just so much easier and if you do a search back through the posts quite a number of other Pentax User forum members would also like it. I appreciate others have different preferences for reading forum posts but it's just another way of offering choice and making the forum more accessible and ultimately more popular.

So how about it Pentax User team? Please.