RSS Feeds

[Matt K]

Hey all,

Got a question about RSS feeds. They're actually enabled but how to get there is not particularly intuitive, possibly because of the infrequency that the developers anticipated the feature being used. All you have to do to get a feed for any section of the application is change viewforum to feed (or append feed.php if your URL doesn't exist). E.g. if you wanted to subscribe to this post you would chagne:

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https://trombonechat.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13809

to

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https://trombonechat.com/feed.php?f=3&t=13809

To subscribe to all news & announcements, change:

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https://trombonechat.com/viewforum.php?f=3

to

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https://trombonechat.com/feed.php?f=3

You can put that URL into your feed-reader you'll be good. Just tested it in Inoreader, which is what I use for RSS content and it worked a-okay. If you enter it in your browser, you'll get a download instead of an XML formatted page.

[Neo Bri]

Coolness. Thanks!

[afugate]

Any thoughts about embedding an HTML header entry exposing the respective RSS for a given forum or topic?

Something for the various forums along the lines of:

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="![CDATA[Trombone Chat News & Announcements]]" href="https://trombonechat.com/app.php/feed/forum/3" />

That would allow RSS readers to see these pages.

--Andy in OKC

[Neo Bri]

My go-to place is "unread posts" and I noticed already that my RSS Reader (FeedBro) does pick up some topics but not all. Strange.

[tjonz]

For your consideration: The RSS feed for another forum I follow includes an automated daily post entitled "Discussions" that lists the topics of all threads that were active the previous day. Items in this list link to the first of that day's posts within the thread. Very handy.

[Matt K]

I'm very reluctant to make any changes to the vanilla implementation of the software, particularly if it isn't through a modestly popular add-on. That said, I beleive you can get what both of you are asking for here:

"Active" posts:

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https://trombonechat.com/feed.php?search_id=active_topics

"New posts":

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https://trombonechat.com/search.php?search_id=newposts

"Unanswered posts":
[codehttps://trombonechat.com/search.php?search_id=unanswered[/code]

Andy, is there a particular RSS reader that you have that this doesn't work for? Inoreader seems to be able to handle these links as-is so it might be easier to just troubleshoot the individual use case.

[afugate]

I'm very reluctant to make any changes to the vanilla implementation of the software, particularly if it isn't through a modestly popular add-on.

That's sensible. Hand editing templates makes upgrades more challenging.

Andy, is there a particular RSS reader that you have that this doesn't work for? Inoreader seems to be able to handle these links as-is so it might be easier to just troubleshoot the individual use case.

Way back when I spent a fair amount of time working with my team to make sites autodiscoverable through RSS. Frankly, I think RSS has fallen out of favor these days, so I was probably trying to solve a problem that doesn't really need solving.

You guys keep up the good work!

--Andy in OKC