talkmagic.co.uk

Hello

Firstly, I would like to congratulate the admins and thank the posters a really top site that I read almost every day.

There is one feature that I believe to be missing RSS feeds. Is this something that is planned or easy to implement?

Kind Regards
Steve P (Humdai)

humdai wrote:There is one feature that I believe to be missing RSS feeds. Is this something that is planned or easy to implement?

Thnaks for your kind words, as far as we know RSS feeds aren't planned - no idea if they're easy or not, sorry !

If needs be mandrake, I can knock something up for you. I'm a PHP developer by trade.

Cheers - such things are all in the hands of the Forum owner and he's well into many other things these days so not something I'd expect to see happening here in the near future, thanks anyway !

For those of us that don't know.....what exactly is an RSS feed?

hard to explain, best to be shown it working but some explaination here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29

Kind Regards
Steve P

RSS feeds would be a terrible idea for the magic forum—both due to the logistics of the actual coding and the ethics behind what is shared.

Basically, a good amount of re-coding would need doing to the forum to be able to get aggregated feeds out of the 'allowed' public areas, and not others.

Lots of hard work, for not much point. Most users find that visiting the site and using it as it is is OK, so if it ain't bust, don't fix it!

Besides—a poll revealing which members would appreciate an RSS feed would possibly reveal that:

70% of members don't know what RSS is
20% like the forum as it is
8% don't care
2% think it's a great idea

moodini wrote:For those of us that don't know.....what exactly is an RSS feed?

Heheheheh

That's 1% of the 80% already done!

In laymans terms, an RSS feed is a display of all the 'items' in a site's databes, which is a list that can be sorted by date, title, etc.

For things like news websites, it's perfect. And I would imagine that for *some* forums it would work well too.

But, you need a separate RSS reader to view RSS feeds. An RSS reader can be integrated into a web browser, or a standalone application (like a news ticker). However, this is another bit of software!

The list is retrieved as plain text from the database of the website the RSS is coming from, and shown as as simple links. If you see a 'headline' or 'article' which looks interesting, click it and you're taken to the main website which the link came from.

I think my personal level of confusion alone could amount t 2% worth...lol

Sorry was not too useful:

In short in allows you to see updates to a webpage with programs other than a webbrowser. This means your mail program or an app on your desktop or a ticker at the top of your screen or txt message or pop-up window alerts you to a new message in the forums.

Very cool piece of software.

Steve P

seige wrote:Basically, a good amount of re-coding would need doing to the forum to be able to get aggregated feeds out of the 'allowed' public areas, and not others.

I don't agree with this point, it would be pretty simple to modify it to only display specific forums, but as to the rest of the points, yes I agree that the losses outweigh the benifits. But there is one thing you are not considering, it's not only websites that can aggrigate (I can never spell that word) content from feeds, but also standalone RSS clients, and mozilla firefox can do it by default too.

So seige, while we are on the topic, it might be a nice feature for NUMS, allow people to display the most recent products you have added, or latest special offers on their own website. Might be a handy way to get you a little more business!

oeb wrote:

seige wrote:Basically, a good amount of re-coding would need doing to the forum to be able to get aggregated feeds out of the 'allowed' public areas, and not others.

I don't agree with this point, it would be pretty simple to modify it to only display specific forums, but as to the rest of the points, yes I agree that the losses outweigh the benifits. But there is one thing you are not considering, it's not only websites that can aggrigate (I can never spell that word) content from feeds, but also standalone RSS clients, and mozilla firefox can do it by default too.

So seige, while we are on the topic, it might be a nice feature for NUMS, allow people to display the most recent products you have added, or latest special offers on their own website. Might be a handy way to get you a little more business!

Modifying the forum would be a rather extensive task. For starters, there are several depths of 'access' for different people, and although an RSS feed may benefit the site in terms of web traffic, I can't see it being any more useful than bookmarking the 'New posts since last visit' page.

I also mentioned that standalone clients and browsers support RSS. So I'm not sure what the point of that little comment was!

And in reference to NUMS having an RSS feed... No. For three reasons...

1. Bot traffic vs human traffic. I pay a large amount of money each month to host NUMS. And a good deal of bandwidth is taken up by pointless bots, scouring the site for content. Adding RSS would increase this, as unless I used a cached RSS feed (pointless) then each RSS access would be ANOTHER genuine customer waiting for slow-loading pages.
CONCLUSION: Unnacceptible

2. I've been programming for the Web since before most people even knew what the web was... since pages had no images... since modems ran at below 9600bps. And certainly since I made 'every byte count'.
The one thing which always pains me is that every time a new toy comes along, whether it be RSS, Flash, Blogs, etc. people feel that they 'must' incorporate.
Well... here's news for you. I believe that functionality, speed and familiarity are more important. Ergo, there's never going to be an RSS feed on NUMS (refer to point one) and there will probably never need to be.
It would seem that only Bloggers who want traffic are realizing the power of RSS. And anyone wanting fast Search Engine ranks can use RSS too—but personally I find it a bane.
CONCLUSION: If it ain't bust, don't fix it

3. Get more business at NUMS? I really don't think I could cope with any more. I spend all day designing websites, brochures and advertising—and all night packing up parcels for NUMS and writing new magic. I run a highly successful Search Engine Optimisation company as a sideline, and that brings me more than enough traffic to the NUMS site.
Special offers etc. go out as a targetted newsletter, and don't involve attracting spambots and bandwith suckers.
CONCLUSION: Don't look for shortcuts in SEO. Do it properly and create a content rich site.

But thanks for the advice

I'm not trying to change your mind here or anything, I personally dont see the point of offering a 'latest messeges' list to a medium that is essentially a 'latest messages' list as it stands.

I'm just debating geek stuff for the sake of it here.

seige wrote:Modifying the forum would be a rather extensive task. For starters, there are several depths of 'access' for different people, and although an RSS feed may benefit the site in terms of web traffic, I can't see it being any more useful than bookmarking the 'New posts since last visit' page.

You dont need to modify the forum at all. The RSS feed can be generated with a PHP script that just pulls the information from the same database. You just feed in the ID's of the forums it is allowd to spit out and construct your SQL statement around that.

seige wrote:I also mentioned that standalone clients and browsers support RSS. So I'm not sure what the point of that little comment was!

That's what I get for not reading all of a topic then.

oeb wrote:You dont need to modify the forum at all. The RSS feed can be generated with a PHP script that just pulls the information from the same database. You just feed in the ID's of the forums it is allowd to spit out and construct your SQL statement around that..

True, and yet at the same time untrue.

The 'forum' and database planning would need a lot of restructuring for the RSS to be effective tool, or shall we say, a 'useful' addition to the functions of the forum. Currently, an RSS feed would provide no more useful on the forum in reality.

True to say that a simple PHP script would draw-off info from the database, but being as the database is being constantly modified and used by the forum also, an integral solution would need to be found which was sympathetic to the general extensibility of the forum's own modular backbone (phpBB).

As it stands, the forum is currently 'stable'. Hence the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' scenario.

Re-writing the forum so that the current level of control could be administered to RSS feeds would indeed incur work—and even a 'stand alone' script which was capable of ripping out say, for instance, the latest 10 articles which are NOT in any restricted area would mean increased server load, and would STILL not be as effective to the end user as the already integral 'Posts since last visit' bookmark. Simply running a SQL query to get an ID etc. may not suffice, unless more functionality could be added to the phpBB and also the database.

A famous quote: Don't run if you're not being chased.