RSS Feeds?

[Bryan]

Are you planning on enabling those? That could be a good way to track updates (if you have a news reader like Google).

[jkwuc89]

We'll take a look. I did not know that vBulletin supported RSS feeds. You can also subscribe to forums via e-mail.

[Bryan]

We'll take a look. I did not know that vBulletin supported RSS feeds. You can also subscribe to forums via e-mail.

The advantage of RSS is:
1. Get notice of updates quicker, as they are posted, not just once daily.
2. Can actually read the messages in the reader w/out going to the forum (if RSS2).

You can subscribe to a thread to get e-mail on every post, but at the forum level the most frequent is daily. The RSS would give it more of the e-mail feel. Course, I am not sure what impact it would have on the server that hosts the forum.

[jkwuc89]

Bryan,

I'll let you be our tester for the RSS feeds. The URLs are below:

Basketball RSS Feed: http://forums.bearcatnews.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=2
Football RSS Feed: http://forums.bearcatnews.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=3
General RSS Feed: http://forums.bearcatnews.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=4
Feedback RSS Feed: http://forums.bearcatnews.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=5
Where are they now? RSS Feed: http://forums.bearcatnews.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=7

[Bryan]

Here is what I found so far:

1. The RSS feed only lists new threads.

I thought it would list each new post, but it only lists the first post of a thread.

Example (warning, contains humourous attempt):
So let's say a forum member (let's call him 'A') posts about how great everything is, and how bad it was and calls it "Things are SOO much better". You would get a listing for that message on the feed that would include the title, author and message.

If forum member (let's call him 'D') responds to the thread how miserable everything is and how the golden age is gone, never to return, you would get no notice of that posting. If however, D starts a completely new thread called "The sky has fallen and won't get up", that would show up in the feed (though successive bantering between A and D of "You're stupid", "No, You're stupid" will not).

I was disappointed at first, but it is kind of nice. You can easily click on any new thread listed and subscribe to it to get e-mail updates on any new postings and you aren't swamped if the thread gets bogged down by back and forth repetitions (not that THAT would ever happen here).

2. You can mix and match your feeds.

Keith's links are for each specific Forum. If you delete the end of any link (the "&forumid=n") you will get any postings to any forum. If you want to get notice of just a few, you can change the ending to something like:

&forumid=2,4,5,7

That example would give you all the forums except Football. Not that I have anything against football.

HTH, I'll share any further insights as they come...