[Suggestion] Few suggestions related to RSS Feeds / Global RSS Feed

Chromaniac

Well-known member
Here are some suggestions I would like to make regarding expanding support for RSS Feeds.

  • Global RSS feed for all the new threads: This comes handy for pure moderation point of view.

    Update: I am currently using Yahoo Pipes to get the latest threads from all the forums here on Xenforo. The feed just has post name and post links. An excerpt would have been very nice.
  • Global RSS feed for all the new posts: This one comes handy for moderation and... I use the latest post RSS feed of my forum to feed to my forums's official Twitter account for people who subscribe to it. The best case scenario would be that the link points to the specific post. vB has a feed for this but the link points to the first post in the thread which makes it pretty pointless.
  • RSS feed for individual threads: This one comes handy for users who do not want to join the forum to monitor a specific thread. They can subscribe to the thread they are interested in using an RSS Feed.
  • RSS feed for individual user: This can come handy if I want to just follow posts and threads started by an individual user. I can see a couple of uses for this as well. Following the updates through RSS of developers on this forum for example.
In simple terms, the suggestion is to add RSS feeds for all possible streams of data. Of course, when the time allows. I had actually like the ability to have RSS feed for searches as well but as the developers have already mentioned in one of my threads that searches on forums is a very processor intensive task, I assume it would not be possible at all!


People tend to find wonderful uses for such data which is made available through a very accessible format. RSS is a wonderful and a very powerful technology. With services like Yahoo Pipes, it can be used for some really interesting implementations...

Cheers.

Update: I know there is an existing thread about this here:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/is-there-a-global-rss-feed.1015/

But that is not in the feature suggestion section and not as comprehensive. So, I made a new thread here.

I am sort of getting a lot of negative mmm vibes for the suggestions and thoughts I place here. So here is a little disclaimer. These suggestions are based on my personal usage requirements. And these are just requests for developers to consider. If you find them pointless for your own use, feel free to say so but do not criticize my need for these features.
 
Upvote 8
Sushubh, all of these should be doable, given our highly flexible view layer, but I can't give you an estimated time when you might see them appear as official features. In the interim, they would be good candidates for relatively simple third-party add-ons.

I'm responding here because I saw your tweet, but I'm not going to make a habit of specifically responding to threads because of badgering via Twitter. Please look around this place to see that we are massively busy, and poking us via Twitter because we haven't responded to a thread of yours in a couple of days really isn't on.
 
Thanks for responding. I did tweet after thinking about it for a while. I understand your point completely about misusing Twitter for these things. But the lack of RSS support on the forum had me confused all this time. I just thought that you guys probably decided that RSS is sort of passe and is no longer critical enough to be offered as a core feature on the forum (also considering RSS support is also so terrible on vB! i do not remember much about IPB) so was sort of alarmed. I assure you that I would not be bothering you guys without a good reason through Twitter in the future. I am sorry about that. It was just that these three features are very relevant to my needs and was just looking for dev's point of view!
 
also wanted to add here. i was not looking for a quick implementation of the features i want. i just wanted to hear your thoughts! i have received responses to most of my other queries and i am pretty happy to get a word from you and mike about them.

from my experience here, i have realized that my requirements are pretty different from most other users. so, they do not generate interest from other members of the forum... your response about improved RSS support is positive in nature and that helps.

i can surely use Yahoo Pipes to get a unified feed from all the forums in the mean time. so that can work for me as a quick hack initially.

i am also hoping that some dev out there would have similar requirements and would develop some add-ons that i can use. being a non-coder, i am pretty much reliant upon you guys and the developers community.
 
now that i am on a roll on the feature list related to RSS feeds here is another one.

i have to admit here that most of these features are inspired from bbpress.

i have tremendous love for bbpress and its extensive support for RSS feeds. but it is simply not suitable for my own forum.

so i am just making requests for features that i love in that piece of gem!

bbpress was initially designed to support updates only through RSS. they have since then added email based alerts.

for RSS based forum alerts, they have this favorite feature which is similar to Watch feature here.

basically, you could reply in as many threads you like. but you had the ability to select the ones you want to follow using that favorite button.

and that favorite thread feature is accessible from your own profile page along with an RSS feed.

so basically, you could have a single unified RSS feed for all the threads that you are following on a forum.

totally free of emails! i find that pretty incredible as a heavy user of RSS feeds.

if RSS feeds are ever improved on XF, this would be another of my feature request.
 
I'm glad I found your thread because I was looking all over the place for a global rss feed. Shocking that it's not already available.
 
yeah. that was a major surprise to me too. i am using yahoo pipes to combine the feeds here. still not migrated my own forum. waiting for beta 2 for another try. first one was a major fail.
 
yeap. PubSubHubbub i believe is a more popular and supported standard. it is pretty awesome and makes RSS realtime. i am amazed at how fast it works!
 
I'm also need this! The rss is an unique sharing and promotion system.

Imagine this: if every user has this own rss, he can promote his topics on facebook, twitter and msn messenger using the rss feeds and tools like twitterfeed etc.

With global rss you can also share in other websites your content.

IMHO is a very important feature.

I can't imagine a modern community software without a global rss feed...
 
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