Metanet Forums

This is a little thing that occurred to me recently that this forum did not have an RSS feed. As most of you would know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and can be used to stream feeds of recent postings on websites such as BBC News. This allows for easy updates on new and interesting happenings on the site in question. Also it is easy to access the feed easily through Feed Readers/Aggregators in standalone applications or built into programs such as Firefox and Thunderbird. Even mobile applications are available to read RSS feeds.

Forum boards have the ability to run RSS feeds on Recent Topics (Well I know IPB can anyway), and I thought this would interest some of you. So this is my suggestion. I will set up a poll for those others who are interested.

Could we get a 'Recent Topics' RSS feed?

I don't really think this would be necessary. You can subscribe to topics and receive email updates when new posts are added.

But email isn't the same, with RSS you see what's in the topic instantly, not after clicking the link and waiting for your browser to load.

It'd be useful to an extent.
I actually think it would be a good feature for this site.

You could always bookmark the 'View New Posts' link. :/

I suggested this back on forumer and was told that we didn't have that option. Do we now?

I wouldn't use it, but it sounds fine.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to build an RSS feed with the same queries the forum already uses. What would you want from an RSS feed? Active Topics? New Posts, Unanswered Posts? Full posts or just topic titles? Every post listed as they come in? List of active topics every 24 hours? You guys tell me what you want.

I'm thinking New Posts with full text or, if possible, the sort of preview of the post that a forum search gives you.

Yeah, New Posts and Full Post Details (Not just titles). Sounds alright.

Hm, perusing this thread, I have one more idea. How about something for easily viewing new posts in topics you started? I know I said there's subscribing to threads, but after what LV said, I think an RSS feed would be more widely used.

I vote Yea.