Is there any way we could get SnarkFest RSS feeds activated, vwlphb?

Apparently the Invision software supports it (tutorial at the link) so it may just be a matter of setting it up.

(To snarkers who haven't played with RSS yet: Have a look at Google Reader to get an idea of what can be done with it.)

ETA: Here is an Invision forum that supports RSS, if anyone wants to know what it would look like. The RSS feeds are the little green square icons. You copy the link into your RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) and the reader will automatically update as the threads change. (This link happens to be to a Mac forum, but feeds work anywhere. I just happened to see it there.)

I like that idea very much. Would that mean you would be able to see all the new posts on the reader? That would be handy.

I think so. You would also have feeds for individual threads, so you could track them, too. Take a look at the forum I linked to above to get an idea of the capabilities.

(Also, everyone who wasn't interested in using them could just ignore them. Nothing would really change for those people, so there isn't a downside to this.)

It's not as easy as just flipping it on. Forumer doesn't support RSS feeds. You can read a thread about it here, and there are apparently more - that's just the first I found.

If many people feel really strongly about it, I'll try to see about hacking it when I have spare time, which won't be for a while I'm sure. So for now you'll have to be satisfied with just going to "View New Posts" to get a list of the new posts since whenever you last read the threads. I'm pretty sure you can customize "My Assistant" to show certain threads too, which is more like the RSS feed feature.

Did you check for the setting? It says it's right in "Admin Control Panel - MANAGEMENT - RSS Management" (that's the menu sequence or something, I guess).

That thread you cited is a year old, so maybe it really is just flipping it on now. Can you just look?

Also, we're on IPB, not phpBB, and the latter is the one they said had trouble.

I can't imagine actually reading SF threads on Google Reader--I mean, if there was only one or two threads on the board you actually cared about, maybe, but multiple SF thread feeds would clog GR with posts in no time. You'd never be able to use "View All New Items" at all--although you can view all threads with new posts here, which is simply what I do.

Cleo, take a look at that board I linked in the original post. The main RSS feed is basically the "View New Posts" thing.

(What I actually had in mind was to make a "View New Posts" Mac widget, but I need the RSS feed for that.)

But then... why not just use the one on the board?

Well, I would have a much harder time making a widget from that for technical reasons. (RSS is much easier to extract information from than a standard webpage. Also, Apple just released beta software of program that automatically generates a widget from an RSS feed, so I would even need to do any coding.)

Also, I'm pretty sure RSS can just be turned on by the admin (unless we have some old version of IPB?). I'm not sure why vwl is saying that forumer can't do it.

Okay, I think I'm not understanding what the benefit of the widget is now. I mean, I know what widgets are in general, but what would this one do that you couldn't get from the View New Messages page?

For those of use who use RSS feeds in aggregators (I use Bloglines), it would be nice. It would streamline our viewing of the forum. I don't think, however, that everyone would get as much benefit out of it.

I'm sorry, but tell me again why "View New Posts" isn't sufficient? Now we're going to start some project that's really only going to benefit the few people who bother reading in RSS format? I really don't get why it's so important to invest time making something newer and shinier and more streamlined if only a small portion of the members are going to bother with it and we already have something that does that.

Yes Andy, I did. Also, I'm not a complete idiot. I know what system we are on. I can read a tutorial and check to see if it works. It doesn't.

Again, just to make sure it's clear, forumer won't do it. As I said when I first responded, there's no easy way to flip it on. I said that becuase I checked, and the page you linked to had instructions that do not apply to our forum. I'm not just talking out of my hat here.

I honestly thought you hadn't checked it, vwl, just looked at that thread on Forumer. If you checked, and it ain't there, it ain't there. Sigh. Don't get mad, please, I just had my hopes up.
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spidey, I was more than half convinced that it was just a matter of turning it on, not some extensive undertaking. (It really shouldn't be one -- I don't know why Forumer doesn't support this yet.) As for just a small portion of members, if it were there I think more people would use it once the benefits became clear.

As for why it would be nicer than repeatedly pounding "View New Posts", it lets you collect the information from "View New Posts" and send it to an RSS reader, along with all your other blogs, news sources, weather, etc. Actually, Firefox supports RSS, so if you have Firefox you can play around with it yourself -- just click the little green square that sometimes appears in the place where you type the URL. There's one on the New York Times page if you want to try it out.
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cleo, with a widget for checking the new posts, I wouldn't have to check SF at all, because the new posts would get sent out automatically. I could view them with one keypress, next to the weather, the movies playing at my local theater, etc. Here's a picture of what it looks like. The blue widget titled "The Big Meow" is an RSS widget that shows Diane Duane's online research materials for that book, and it looks something like what a Snarkfest widget would look like.

I think this is where my comprehension problems originate, because I don't understand why you wouldn't want to visit the board itself with its pretty, pretty blue layout. Different strokes, I guess.