Tracking forums via RSS feeds

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rxmd

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Hi,

I just discovered for myself that RFF has an option to track forums via RSS feeds. (An RSS feed is basically a small file generated by the forum software with the latest updates in specified subforums.). These RSS feeds can be monitored in modern web browsers (such as Firefox or Opera), mail clients (such as Thunderbird), specialised RSS feed aggregator software and even integrated into some websites (such as Google Mail, where they're called Web Clips). You can tell the software to update the RSS feed regularly, such as once per hour or once per day. Since RSS files are very small, the advantage is that you don't have to reload the whole site to check if there are any new postings. This helps to keep the load on the server down.

To get the RSS feed for a given subforum, first find the forum ID. The forum ID is the number by which the forum software refers to the forum in question. To find it, open the forum in your web browser. The URL used for the forum will be something like http: //rangefinderforum.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=71 (for the RFF News forum); in this case the forum ID is 71. For the Leica forum it's 10, for the general discussion forum it's 27, and for the FSU forum it's 34.

Now to get the RSS feed for a given subforum, use the following URL, and place the ID for the forum you want to monitor into to the "forumids" parameter:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/external.php?type=rss&forumids=71&lastpost=1

REMEMBER TO REMOVE ANY SPACE CHARACTERS IN THE WEB ADDRESS, SUCH AS BETWEEN THE : and / PARTS OR IN THE "lastpost" SECTION BELOW. (These were necessary to make the forum software show the whole URL for demonstration purposes, otherwise it would have been difficult to read.)

This gives you just the headlines of the last 15 new postings. (The limit of 15 is hardcoded into the VBulletin configuration.) If you want to have the content of the last posting as well, use the option to get an RSS2 feed instead. So for the RFF News forum, use the following URL:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/ forums/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=71&lastpost=1

If you want to monitor more than one forum, you can either use separate RSS feeds, or you can have the RFF site aggregate several forums into the same feed. To do this, use the following URL scheme:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/ forums/external.php?type=rss&forumids=10,27,34,71&lastpost=1 (headlines only)
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/ forums/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=10,27,34,71&lastpost=1 (last posting content as well)

Disclaimer: Here's a few things you can't do with RSS feeds on VBulletin sites such as RFF. You can't track PMs, and you can't track your personal subscribed galleries in "User CP". The software simply doesn't support it; there's no way to enable that, and there would be no use asking the Bartender about it.

Philipp
 
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Another nice place where RSS support works is the Gallery, which has its own RSS feed. The PhotoPost gallery software has a rather powerful RSS module which is very flexible. To get the RSS feed for the whole gallery, use this URL:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/external.php?type=RSS2

You can slim this down considerably to track specific galleries. To get the RSS feed only for specific galleries, go to the gallery in question, look at its URL and find the category ID. The URL will look something like this:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/showmembers.php?cat=500 (where 500 is the category ID, for the "Member Galleries" category). Other category IDs are 7144 for the "My 10 best pics" gallery or 7485 for the 2008 Street Contest gallery. To track these galleries in an RSS feed, use the following:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/external.php?type=RSS2&cat=500
(and replace the "500" with the ID of the gallery you're interested in).

You can also track users' personal submissions into their member gallery. For example, the URL for my own personal gallery is this:
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/showgallery.php?ppuser=4985&cat=500
Here you see that it's a member gallery (category 500), and that in particular it's for PhotoPost user 4985 (me). So to track changes to this gallery you'd use
http: //www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/external.php?type=RSS2&ppuser=4985&cat=500. That way your RSS feed will be updated whenever I post a picture to my own gallery (which I've been rather lazy about). To receive updates for changes to other users' member galleries, change the ppuser parameter number to the gallery user ID of the user whose gallery you're interested in.

In general, RSS feeds are a great way to keep updated of changes on RFF without having to reload the whole page; they can help to reduce server load considerably and make it easier to be updated about changes.
 
I've been subscribing to these forums' RSS feeds for quite some time now--it's a very handy feature and I'd be upset if the ability was taken away from me!

For Mac users, I recommend NetNewsWire!
 
It's working, sort of.

I have the RFF2 feed set up for four forums:
60 Point and shoot
62 Compact 35mm's
74 Members
110 Miscellaneous

The 74 (members) part is not working at all.

The other three are very slow to update, maybe an hour or so between a comment appearing at RFF before I see it in Google Reader.

Are other people experiencing anything similar?
 
An hour is not that bad for RSS, truthfully. It's not usually intended as an up-to-the-minute news source, especially not for more casual forums like this one.

In short, the RSS feed is less for finding posts the second they happen -- that's what coming to the website is for -- so much as the RSS feed is a convenient way to recap what's been happening that day, allowing you to peruse the postings along with other news items in your RSS reader.

My only real complaint with the RSS feed is that I wish the feed would include the text of the first post. I can't say how many times I read an interesting title and wind up at a boring thread, or vice versa.
 
In addition to the comment about the update frequency:

ClaremontPhoto said:
The 74 (members) part is not working at all.
Click to expand...

That's because the Members Only forum is only for registered, logged-in users. There's no way to tell the forum's RSS engine that this particular Google Reader query comes from user ClaremontPhoto, so it's only the public parts that can be read that way.
 
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