# RSS Feeds



## jonolumb

I love to use WordReference forums and its nice to keep up to date with the activity online but I also visit lots of other websites every day and so this becomes a bit of a chore after a while. I am aware that it is possible to get RSS feeds up and running on the forums and I think this would give the community a real boost! People could subscribe to the forums that were of interest (For example, French, Spanish etc) and then from their new reader, would be able to see if there were any new threads that they would be able to contribute to. What do people think?

Thanks for reading my suggestion.
Jono


----------



## Jana337

Just for the sake of completeness: Registered members can subscribe to a forum and get an e-mail whenever a new thread is opened; it is one of the forum features.

P.S. Welcome!


----------



## Etcetera

Hi and welcome, Jonolumb.
I prefer to check for new threads from the forums' pages, and I even disabled the subscription feature mentioned by Jana long ago. 
One possible negative side of RSS may be that there would be just too many notifications: the traffic is very heavy in certain forums, such as Spanish-English, for example.


----------



## jonolumb

Hi, thanks for adding that about the email subscription. I was aware of the feature but forgot to mention it. It is not however, what I was looking for. I like to be able to access all the information I need in one place (Google Reader) and then go from there, should I want to read on....

The point about the sheer amount of traffic present is valid, however, I don't think this would be a reason to discount using RSS feeds altogether, I guess its up to individuals to decide whether or not to use such a feature taking the above into account.


----------



## Jana337

Etcetera said:


> Hi and welcome, Jonolumb.
> I prefer to check for new threads from the forums' pages, and I even disabled the subscription feature mentioned by Jana long ago.


I don't think we are talking about the same: You probably mean subscription to threads you've participated in (which is forum default), whereas I said you could subscribe to a whole subforum, to all threads there regardless of your participation. They are two different things and the latter is rarely used.


----------



## jonolumb

Jana337 said:


> I don't think we are talking about the same: You probably mean subscription to threads you've participated in



No, I was also referring to the more global subscription options available. However, whilst globally subscribing to the French-English forum might generate hundreds of emails per day, clogging up your inbox, having hundreds of new RSS feed entries a day is completely manageable if you use a good reader.


----------



## lsp

Jana337 said:


> Just for the sake of completeness: Registered members can subscribe to a forum and get an e-mail whenever a new thread is opened; it is one of the forum features.
> 
> P.S. Welcome!


RSS feeds are a much more desirable alternative to receiving one email (and email alerts if you have them on your desktop, Blackberry and/or whatever...) per thread update. It's why I opted out of all email subscriptions.


----------



## Jana337

jonolumb said:


> No, I was also referring to the more global subscription options available. However, whilst globally subscribing to the French-English forum might generate hundreds of emails per day, clogging up your inbox, having hundreds of new RSS feed entries a day is completely manageable if you use a good reader.





lsp said:


> RSS feeds are a much more desirable alternative to receiving one email (and email alerts if you have them on your desktop, Blackberry and/or whatever...) per thread update. It's why I opted out of all email subscriptions.


Yes, sure, I know the difference.  Forum subscription could be an option for people who are interested in one of the small forum (Legal terminology, Japenese etc.) but don't want to log in "in vain".


----------



## scotu

Jana337 said:


> Just for the sake of completeness: Registered members can subscribe to a forum and get an e-mail whenever a new thread is opened; it is one of the forum features.
> 
> P.S. Welcome!


 
Can you apply this feature to a single thread, or if you choose this option, does it apply to all the threads on your subscription list?

Thanks, scotu


----------



## Jana337

scotu said:


> Can you apply this feature to a single thread, or if you choose this option, does it apply to all the threads on your subscription list?
> 
> Thanks, scotu


A complete survey of subscription options:

1. Subscribe to a whole forum
On the main page of the specific language forum you want to subscribe to, go to *Forum tools *and select *Subscribe to this forum*. You will then receive daily emails with a summary of that day's posts. Very few people use this. Not recommended for big forums.

2. Subscriptions to threads.

a. Automatic subscription (to threads you have posted in)
- subscription with instant e-mail notification (forum default),
- subscription with daily e-mail notification,
- subscription with weekly e-mail notification,
- subscription without notification,
(_If you have any of these options, a tick 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 appears at the far right of the box with the thread's title in the list of threads, making it easy for you to identify threads you have participated in_),
- no subscription.

If you alter the type of subscription you have, the change will not have a retroactive effect. Changes to your previous subscriptions have to be made manually in your User Control Panel (list of subscribed threads). To select all threads on a particular page, check the empty box at the far right of the row of headings. Scroll down and move all threads to the new subscription folder. Repeat for all pages.

b. Individual subscription
You can subscribe to a thread you have not participated in.  Go to the thread, click on *Thread tools *(at the top of the page), and choose *Subscribe to this thread *from the dropdown menu.

c. Customization on a case-by-case basis
When you are composing a post and want to override your usual subscription type, click on the *Advanced mode* and scroll down. In *Additional options*, you will find all the possibilities mentioned above under 2a. Your choice will apply only to that one thread.

***

Please posts corrections, suggestions and improvements. I will copy this into the Tweaking sticky later.


----------



## replicante7

jonolumb said:


> I am aware that it is possible to get RSS feeds up and running on the forums and I think this would give the community a real boost!  What do people think?


Hi Jono

Are you suggesting RSS entries only for new threads in a Foum or also for every post?
I guess that it would be helpful (at least, to me) for taking a look of new threads easily. But if RSS entries would include all the post in the Forum it could be too much for me. 
Maybe I would use RSS for taking a look of the new threads and later I would use "subscribing tool" for following those threads in which I could be interested.


----------



## jonolumb

Hi Replicante
I was suggesting RSS subscription to an entire forum, so that, for example, you could see all the latest threads from French-English. This would allow people to periodically check for threads that interest them in their RSS reader without having to sift through the more awkward forum interface .


----------



## PhilFrEn

jonolumb said:


> Hi Replicante
> I was suggesting RSS subscription to an entire forum, so that, for example, you could see all the latest threads from French-English. This would allow people to periodically check for threads that interest them in their RSS reader without having to sift through the more awkward forum interface .


 
Hi,

taken like that it could be nice indeed, selecting key words and seing in th RSS engine the threads refering to your selections.

Otherwise, making a RSS for "new threads" in general will be quickly overloaded in my opinion, because new threads, thre's a lot per minute during the day .


----------



## replicante7

PhilFrEn said:


> Otherwise, making a RSS for "new threads" in general will be quickly overloaded in my opinion, because *new threads, *thre's a lot per minute during the day .


Hi PhilFrEn
Are you referring to "new posts" instead of "new threads" (in bold)? I guess so, is it?



jonolumb said:


> Hi Replicante
> I was suggesting RSS subscription to an entire forum, so that, for example, you could see all the latest threads from French-English. This would allow people to periodically check for threads that interest them in their RSS reader without having to sift through the more awkward forum interface .


Hi, jonolumb

PhilFrEn has talked about what I had asked you before, I was asking if RSS subscription to a entire Forum would give you the "new threads entries" an no "*all new posts* entries" (because I guess that this later option is too much stuff).


----------



## zazap

Too bad the poll doesn't have a 4th option:  Confused. What on earth are RSS feeds!
I can't vote, poor me...


----------



## jonolumb

Have a look on wikipedia, i would post the link but I'm not allowed to!!


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

jonolumb said:


> Have a look on wikipedia, i would post the link but I'm not allowed to!!


A friend just asked me the same question. 
Here is a wiki link, zazap (et en français).


----------



## PhilFrEn

replicante7 said:


> Hi PhilFrEn
> Are you referring to "new posts" instead of "new threads" (in bold)? I guess so, is it?


 
I was more refering to new thread in fact. You choose key words, and it will let you know whenever new threads intereting for you appear.

New posts is not really realistic, is it? You got RSS changing every half second, it would be useless I think.

Anyway, I think it would not put me away from the forum, I like too much "walking" aournd verey forum, looking to every thing. I would have too many key words for RSS maybe .


----------



## jonolumb

I wasn´t thinking so much along the lines of having the RSS update for every new change - I think things would get out of hand if this was the case.

I was rather advocating an RSS feed that only updates when completely new threads are added to the forum. As for the keywords... I think thats getting rather complicated. One RSS feed per forum is a much more realistic option.


----------



## TrentinaNE

I don't know what would be involved at WRF's end to set up and maintain RSS feeds, but... I imagine it creates a significant amount of additional work and (potentially) headaches for our administrator, Mike Kellogg. Mike already has a number of additional projects on his plate that I suspect have higher priority than this suggestion. 

I think folks should keep in mind that the WRF forums are mainly a reference resource for the WR dictionaries. While certain features might be "nice" for some users, others (like expanding the dictionaries themselves) will ultimately benefit many more people. 

Elisabetta


----------



## jonolumb

Hi Elisabetta
I understand your concerns that adding RSS feeds might cause a headache but this is in fact not actually the case.

The WordReference forums are (as you will know) powered by vBulletin software. There are already many plugins for vBulletin available that allow RSS functionality to be added and so I don't think there would be any problem.

Regarding the addition of "nice" features, my main reason for adding a poll was to see what interest was generated in the community. If lots of people would like to see this feature put in place then I think it should be, likewise, if its just a little whim of mine and nobody else cares, the idea should be scrapped at least for the moment. Furthermore, the more people regularly viewing the forums, the more successful they can be in their aims. If the use of RSS increased the frequency of people visiting the site, it would have a positive impact.

Jono


----------



## mkellogg

Yes, when vBulletin first started supporting RSS feeds, I turned the feature on.  But after a while, I saw that it was doing more harm than good.  

Hundreds of RSS readers and thousands of web browsers were downloading the feeds.  This caused some heavy load on the server, as you can imagine.  Some of those readers hit the server every couple of minutes.  This wouldn't be too bad, but I realized that many people were not even looking at the data that was downloaded to their reader or web browser!  So the server got hit with all that load, and for little benefit.  With the server being overloaded already, it wasn't too difficult of a decision to turn it off.

Mike


----------



## jonolumb

Hi Mike.
I understand the extra strain that the RSS feeds can place on the servers. A possible solution would be to publish the RSS feeds to an address that is not given to the forum users and then use a Feed service like Feedburner to take this feed as an input and provide the end-user feed. This way, Feedburner would take all the server strain. You could then have one feedburner feed per language.
Its certainly worth a thought.
Jono


----------



## mkellogg

Thanks Jono.  I'll check it out to see if it is something that will work for the forums.


----------



## danielfranco

I voted no, the reason being that I usually spend my time in the forums at the Spanish-English General Vocabulary. In that forum, while you'd compose a relatively straight-forward answer to a new thread, five more would have already popped up. When I don't log in to the forums for a few days (no, really, it has happened before, I swear!) and I get replies on the last posts I contributed, often they are behind _*fifty*_ twenty-post pages. I think any RSS feed connected to that specific forum would either implode or have a nervous breakdown.


----------



## jonolumb

Hi Daniel
I am not sure which RSS reader you use but I use Google Reader and all the work is done on their side, I'm sure there would be no problem viewing the feed. Of course, you'd never be able to keep up with all the new posts due to sheer volume but from the thread titles you would be able to narrow down those that might be of interest.
Jono


----------



## jkretch

I'll just chime in to say I would *love* an RSS feed if it can be done in a way that won't overload the server.  I found this site months ago but have only revisited it today because I found an old reminder to myself.  If I had an RSS feed of thread topics I would read the board daily.


----------



## Tezkatlipoka

G'Day everyone!

I need your help concerning the installation of the RSS feed. I created a dynamic bookmark and entered the following adress:

http: //forum.wordreference.com/external.php?type=rss2&searchid=2674062

 Unfortunately it doesn't work and I wasn't able to find help on the site. Does somebody know how to install the feed correctly?

Thanks a lot!

Tez

P.S.: the space between http: and // occures because I'm not allowed to post urls yet!


----------



## Jana337

As you can read in previous posts, this forum no longer has a feed.


----------



## Tezkatlipoka

Yes, after my Post was moved to this poll, I was set up-to-date. I don't know why I couldn't find this theard by my own?!  Sorry!

Tez

P.S.: Although I have to say, a RSS-Feed would have been been quite nice!!


----------



## ratatouille

I'm new in this forum and finally I don't understand if yes or not RSS feeds are available...

I've found a FAQ answer about RSS susbcription (forum.wordreference.com/faq.php?faq=vb_board_usage#faq_vb_rss_syndication) but actually none of the forums I need has this feature on...

Any admin could tell me what are your plans ?

Txs


----------



## Flaminius

Currently RSS feed is not supported in WR forums.  Regarding the plans of the administrator/owner, you may want to take a look at post #24.


----------



## kknd

good day to everybody!

i'd like to ask if introducing of rss would be much of problem—it'd facilitate keeping track of threads (see here).

thanks in advance,
kknd


----------



## jann

Hello KKnd,

I've merged your question about RSS feeds into an old thread on the same topic.  While you wait for an up-to-date answer from someone better informed than I, you may be interested in what people had to say about RSS back in 2007. 

Jann
Moderator


----------



## mkellogg

Hi Kknd,

I've long kept RSS turned off, especially after a few security issues that they had.  Also, I think the last time I looked, it wouldn't let you subscribe to a single forum.  (You could only receive updates from all forums in all languages.)  I'll try to take a look at it in the near future, though.

Mike


----------

