Subscribe to Threads w/ RSS Feeds for Easy Discussion Follow-up

[NeoDevin]

I was thinking about using RSS feeds to follow the posts on a couple of the forums, but the RSS feeds for each of the forums only update with new threads, not with each post to the forum. I would like to be able to subscribe to each thread to follow the discussions. If each thread had an feed associated with it, it would be easy to follow the discussions, and to pick and choose which ones I want to follow, and which ones I don't.

Preferably there would also be a link on the forum RSS entry for the thread to the thread feed.

Thanks.

 

[tiny-tim]

Hi NeoDevin!

I would like to be able to subscribe to each thread to follow the discussions.

You can just click "Thread Tools" in the sub-menu-bar of each thread that interests you, and then click "Subscribe to this thread", and get notifications exactly as if you'd posted in it.

 

[NeoDevin]

Hi NeoDevin!


You can just click "Thread Tools" in the sub-menu-bar of each thread that interests you, and then click "Subscribe to this thread", and get notifications exactly as if you'd posted in it.

I know that, but RSS feeds are better.

 

[tiny-tim]

how?

 

[NeoDevin]

You can read them offline, sort them into folders however you want, and can only mark the ones read that you have actually read. One of the main reasons that I want to use RSS feeds is because the forum marks everything read every time you log in.

 

[NeoDevin]

Do any of the "powers that be" have any comment on if this is something in the works, or if there's no chance of it happening, or somewhere in between?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Thanks for the suggestion. If there is more support for the feature we'd consider developing it.

 

[NeoDevin]

I would like to add that this would have been a useful feature yesterday. I was thinking about posting a quick question on the forum, but didn't have time to read all the posts since my last visit. I didn't want all the posts to be marked as read and have me miss a bunch of discussions, so I decided to forego asking my question instead. If the threads I was following had their own RSS feed, this wouldn't have been a problem.

 

[Moonbear]

Hmm...when the RSS feeds first became available, I gave it a try for a while, and then ditched the idea because I couldn't quite figure out why they were useful. I think this was part of the problem...only seeing new threads really didn't tell me much about what activity was going on. I don't usually subscribe to threads either, because if I'm on the site, I can just go look at them, and I really don't like getting email notifications. BUT, if I could get an RSS feed of subscribed threads, especially if you could create a widget for a Mac to run them on the dashboard, I could just see if something interesting was going on in a subscribed thread when I didn't have my browser open. (I don't have one of those fancy phones where I can use an RSS feed or XML or whatever it is called there, but I could imagine it being useful there if I did.)

If my understanding is correct, once you get a notification that there are new posts in a subscribed thread, you don't continue getting notifications until you check the thread, and all you get is the notification, not any snippet of the actual content of the post. Is that correct? If so, then an RSS feed for subscribed threads would be more useful, because you could scan the snippets of text to see if it's something that would compel you to go back to the thread quickly to read the rest or make another comment, or perhaps clarify something you said earlier, or if it's just a noise post or something else that can wait a while.

Just as a comparison, my email software now has the option to give me a little pop-up while I'm working in another application that tells me who sent an email and the subject line. Then I know if it's something that can wait until I'm done with the other thing I'm working on, or if it's something I've been waiting for and want to respond to immediately. To me, an RSS feed is somewhat like that, just letting you know enough of the new post for each new post to decide if you want to go back to the thread now or later. Notifications are more like the old way of getting emails, where all you got was a ding to tell you there was new email, but without telling you anything about it, so you either always decided to just ignore it, or always decided to check it, and couldn't just glance at a little pop-up to make the decision.

 

[NeoDevin]

Just a bump to see if anyone else is interested in this. I would still really like to see this implemented.

 

[NeoDevin]

This feature would also make PF far easier to follow on mobile devices, when you may only have a few minutes to read a couple of threads, and don't want everything marked as read.

 

[JaredJames]

I know this is old, but I'd like to see something such as this.

I was rather disappointed with the current RSS setup. It just showed me a load of stuff I wasn't particularly interested in and didn't highlight any of the stuff I was subscribed to and wanted to see.