RSS feed info for the forums?

I think you may be correct.

I recently switched from FeedDemon to the Sage RSS plug-in for Firefox and found that Sage does have access to the cookies (as it is likely using the base Firefox get routines).

You do seem quite committed to Opera so I don't know if this is of any use, but perhaps for others...

Yep, I think logins are the problem. If you telnet to forums.secondlife.com:80 and type:

GET /external.php?type=rss2 HTTP/1.1
Host: forums.secondlife.com
Connection: close

The response is:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 09:30:48 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: Apache=193.119.133.199.295341151919048495; path=/; expires=Thu, 30-Jun-16 09:30:48 GMT
Set-Cookie: bblastvisit=1151919048; expires=Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:30:48 GMT; path=/; domain=.secondlife.com
Set-Cookie: bblastactivity=1151919005; expires=Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:30:48 GMT; path=/; domain=.secondlife.com
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Language: en

0

Connection to host lost.

This is NOT what you get when you go to the URL directly in your browser, because you have a login cookie.

I've tried 'FeedReader' and 'SharpReader', both report that it is not a valid RSS feed. I installed Sage from the link above, and it connected OK.

Could the forums be public-readable? I can't see any harm in allowing them to be read-only to the public - especially as the signup process is free and open.

I use BlogLines (www.bloglines.com) and it cannot parse the feed URL. I get an error that the URL does not contain a feed.
I have tried Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. Both are able to read the feed URL.