[Dream Catcher]

is it possible to have one?

[agent slice]

just curious,what dose "rss" stand for????? :confused:

[Jorg]

rss = Really Simple Syndication. It's basically a way to embed a "feed" from one site somewhere else. If you use a RSS reader program, like Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/view/), you can add feeds of things you are interested in from sites that support it. Imagine something like Google News (http://news.google.com/), but instead of having headlines, you'd have the latest posts/stories from your favorite websites in one place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

As far as the OP's question, I think RSS is available in vBulletin, but I'm not sure if there is a specific reason why we haven't enabled it. Perhaps one of the admins can come along and elaborate.

[Derek Zeanah]

Volume.

Yesterday, for instance, we had 2,845 new posts and 199 new threads posted. That's a lot to keep up with in an RSS reader, especially if you miss a day or 2.

RSS seems great for blogs, but there's a lot more content posted here than on a typical blog.

[theshephard]

First let me say how much I love this site.. the community, the content, and the administration. Props to it all, and let none of the below raise any ire..

So the comment on volume is a judgment on the reader's ability to consume the data?

What some other forum sites have done to make this highly usable is configure a discrete feed for each forum. That way, a user isn't subscribing to all of thehighroad.org (to your point about overall site volume), but to the individual forums (say for instance I'm really just interested in Activism, Rifle Country, Reloading, & Competition Shooting - I select just those feeds and they all show up individually in Google Reader).

It's no more difficult to survey new threads via an RSS reader than if you went to the board itself, whether a day was missed or not.
In fact, it's easier, since you're navigating all your favorite headline sources from one interface (see attached image), the content is easily searchable, you can add notes to the material, easily keep up on stuff via your phone, and very easily share material with other people, which often leads to new readers.

For working examples, TheFiringLine forums does this, as does Alaska Outdoors Forum, and it works great! I can subscribe to the forum(s) I'm interested on these sites via Google Reader, quickly see what new posts I'm interested in, and jump directly into that conversation, as clicking on the headline brings me to the actual site in a new tab. It works FANTASTIC for forums, and I'd really encourage you all to adopt it.

As far as revenue and hit counts are concerned, the RSS feed is pulled from your site so the hit counts stay up, and you can even embed ads into the feeds if that's important to you.

Bottom line: It's entirely workable, and everyone's doing it. You should to. ;)

[Zak Smith]

Speaking as a forum user, not a moderator, I have the following comments:

* I tried reading specific subforums using an RSS feed on other sites and didn't care for it

* I almost never read THR forum by forum-- I read it by "new posts"

* If 10,000 users have software agents that are reloading the RSS feed 24x a day, that is potentially more server load

Those two things said, I would welcome a more efficient way to interact with forums. It is easy to point out ways that email lists or usenet worked better, but we are here not there.

[Derek Zeanah]

OK, I'm looking at this.

Right now I've tried to turn on the RSS feed option so we can take a look at it. You can see it here (http://thehighroad.org/external.php). Whether it's useful or not isn't something I can comment on, but we all probably browse THR in our own way.

Right now that's 15 posts per page, and 3 days worth of data are available. Let me know what you think. (This site's busy enough that it seems like it would be tough to use an RSS feed to keep up, but my skills may just be rusty.)

[theshephard]

Hey, I really like it! Check it out (image). Although Google Reader only pulls in the first (latest) 15 headlines, so must not be able to traverse the pages. Do you think we could expand the page to 50 headlines?

I think a feed for each separate forum would be cool, but totally happy/satisfied/grateful with this too! Thanks very much for taking the time Derek! It's awesome!

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/wnfiQqlsf3epfZsbVz5gH4NNB3jqKR7KFu77i2aeD9k?feat=directlink

[theshephard]

So learning from other vBulletin experiences, if you want to get an RSS feed to an individual THR forum, modify the following URL string:

http://www.thehighroad.org/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=27

Note the last querystring parameter is "forumids". Change the number to the forum ID you're interested in. For instance, if you go to the reloading forum, you'll see the URL in your browser is:
http://www.thehighroad.org/forumdisplay.php?f=15

The url for the RSS feed of this forum would then be the same as the first link above, but instead of 27, use forum id 15. Therefore:

http://www.thehighroad.org/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=15

Pretty cool!

[Derek Zeanah]

Thanks for the tip.

I can't say that I know much about vBulletin's RSS implementation. Let me know if there are tweaks to be made.

I upped the # of posts to 200; that might be too high, so let me know if it is.

Thanks.

[Derek Zeanah]

OK, it's been three and a half weeks. For those of you using this:

Is it working as you'd like?

Is the 200 posts setting sufficient?

[theshephard]

Hey, sorry Derek for not replying earlier. It's now been like four months and I can tell you I use this almost every day via google reader. Really appreciate it.

I think everything's great in terms of number of messages.

I have feeds in Google Reader for the Handloading and Competition discussions, and then a general one for the whole site. I can scan the headlines quickly and when I see something I want to read I follow the link and it drops me right into the thread at the THR site to read the replies and post replies.

All good, thanks again! Do you all have any way of seeing how much traffic is hitting the RSS link? I'm just curious if you've seen adoption grow since implementing it (e.g. hope I'm not the only one using it. ;)