RSS feed info for the forums?

I get a result when I put "http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php" into the Opera browser's RSS feed.

Anyone know about RSS and how read the Second Life forums from it properly?

I am still working on the problem that someone presented with the "New Posts" output being limited to one hundred posts.

I have since found that trying to see all the posts made by a particular foruim user also only returns one hundred results. I was trying to find something Jeska Linden said. One hundred Jeska posts is more of a cruel joke than a search result.

http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http%3a%2f%2fforums.secondlife.com%2fexternal.php

Sorry
This feed does not validate.

Feeds should not be served with the "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" media type [help]


line 1, column 0: XML parsing error: <unknown>:1:0: no element found [help]


Source: http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php

This is what opera does with that url.

It doesn't produce an error message, and it does show the titles of forum posts.

When you double click on one of the titles, you get a display with a functioning link to the post.

Click on the link and you get taken to the post.



Validators might be too stringent, and there is both an RSS and an RSS2 standard, apparently.

What would the external.php url be for?

I doubt most readers would quibble about the encoding.

Pity it doesn't seem possible to plug any values into it to change what's sent, I'd quite like a feed of the announcements forum.

Interesting. I plugged this into GreatNews, and it seems to load just fine.

Umm, I just installed that program and don't seem to be having any luck.

I take it one needs to add a channel. I put in "http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php" just as I did with the opera browser, but no luck.

Seeing the forum thread titles lin the Opera feed reader ooking like back in the old days when I read the usenet newsgroups is kinda nostalgia inducing.

Text only is so efficient.

Unfortunately my favorite RSS reader, SharpReader, can't parse it.

Which is a shame, cause I'd love to syndicate the forums and treat it like just another blog.

Just downloaded GreatNews (much better than SharpReader) and imported all my OPML files.

Worked great. Also, was able to get external.php working too. Very nice! Thanks to SuezAnne and Tanaquil

I still don't get the sl forum thing to work in that program, but...

try the channel searches with secondlife as a search term, there's all sorts of stuff to be found.

Methinks maybe GreatNews (and possibly others) is based off Internet Explorer and it might work if you log in to the forums in IE before adding the feed.

We use off-the-shelf vbulletin software, which brings both good news and bad news.

The good news is that indeed, vbulletin version 3 comes with some RSS options:

http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php?type=rss

http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php?type=rss2

http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php?type=xml

Depending on your particular RSS reader, you might find one to work better than the other.

In addition, you can specify an RSS feed of any specific forum by adding &forumids=XYZ, where XYZ is the internal vbulletin forum number. You can combine a feed by specifying multiple forum ids, like "forumids=3,15,39"

You can find the forum number by clicking to that forum- in the URL, you will see a "?f=XYZ" part. The XYZ is the forum id number.

As an example, an rss feed to the announcement forum would be:

http://forums.secondlife.com/external.php?type=rss&forumids=3

The bad news is, we do not have any plans to extend what vbulletin already has. But you already do have quite a few options that can hopefully satisfy your RSS needs. =)

Ah, "forumids"!

Thanks Jeff!

Please excuse my poor language, but: rad!

Thanks Jeff - great info! I also posted it here !

The Opera browsers built in Feed Reader seems to do all right with these urls, but the special purupose RSS readers I have tried whine about the stuff not being in the right format, they say that the root element is missing.

I loaded GreatNews to try this out. Seemed to work fine at first, but it only updates new threads, not new posts to existing threads...

Is there something I need to set in options? or is this what it is suposed to do?

Well, here's a question for you all: which RSS reader have you been using? Has it been working?

I, for example, use Firefox 1.5 to subscribe to the forum RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks. They seem to work fine.

I use a widget (Yahoo flavour) called MultiNewsReader or something like that. It's exactly what I want for my feeds, but unfortunatly doesn't handle any kind of login stuff, so the forum feed doesn't work.

Jeff, please check out this thread from Second Life Answers.

I'd very much like to feed announcements into my forums through my vBulletin hack - but it just doesn't seem like it will work unless you guys make some of your forums public.

I'm also using a Flash based RSS reader to test out my feeds before implementing them into my forums. The Flash reader can't pull your feeds either.

When I say the Opera browser displays the forum feed correctly that may be overstating things.

The headers show up fine, but in the area where the body of the message should appear, there is instead a link to the body of the message.

Actually having the text of the message appear in the body area instead of a link to the post would be super.

Using Thunderbird 1.0.7, I get an error saying that the supplied URLs are not valid feeds. *shrug*

I've just tryed with Thunderbird (normally, I've not troubles to read differents feed formats), but I cant read anything.

I've also tried with links in this post, but I obtain only an "invalid RSS file" message, for any of rss, rss2 and xml types.

I use Thunderbird 1.5 as my RSS reader and it claims that all of the urls discussed here are not valid feeds. I also tried ading them to My Yahoo, where I also put news RSS feeds, and it also claims that they are not valid feeds.

I opened a NetVibes account - its a free AJAX desktop/portal at www.netvibes.com - to test this and tried adding the urls there, to be told that they were either not valid or not responding. I added RSS feeds from various news sourcdes and blogs and they worked fine.

So the problem with the RSS feeds being generated by the forums here is quite general, and the fact that they work as live bookmarks in Firefox, and in some specialist readers, is the exception I think.

I think the browsers are dealing with the need to log in the forums. I suppose they maintain cookies or some such. The other programs I tried don't ask for a username and password, so the response they get is most likely an error message of sorts, a page that says you need to login if you are a member and has a link to the signup page if you aren't, but this is in a format for viewing in a browser, not in RSS format.