Forum RSS?

On the Forums page check out the new RSS feed link under the page title.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 7 months ago by  staff.

Alternatively, if you want an email for each new posting, you can subscribe to a forum category. There will be a listing of the forum hierarchy under the main title and to the right of that will be a blue subscribe link (that changes to unsubscribe if you are already subscribed).

The catch is that there has to be at least one posting in the category in order to subscribe to it. Another catch is that I couldn’t find a way to subscribe in that manner to all of the forums, so earlier today I added the RSS feed for all forum postings. As you have likely discovered, the “RSS Site Feed” does not include forum postings. 🙁

There is apparently a difference that I don’t yet completely appreciate between a “page” and a “post”. The one entry I made on your behalf to the FAQ was made as a “post”, and it showed up in the RSS Site Feed. Other changes I made, such as to docs/metadata, were changes to a “page”, and did not show up in the RSS Site Feed. “Page” changes can only be made by an administrator (I think), while “author” and “editor” level users can submit and possibly edit a “post”. To the unregistered site visitor there may be no visible difference between and “post” and a “page”.

I have subscribed to all forums with posts in, but have not received any emails when people post. They do not appear in my gmail spam filter either.

I cannot see any RSS links except the site one, but by trail and error I have found that http://ootbcomp.com/forums/feed works. I will have to make some cron job to filter that and alert me when people other than myself post?

An RSS feed is not the same thing as an email update subscription – as you seem to be finding out. What both of you seem to want is a way to get an email update for any new posting to the forum (or perhaps to the entire site). Apparently nobody in the WordPress ecosystem has either done this – or if they have, they have not shared it.

While it would be possible to redirect the RSS feeds to feedburner, that is a free service now owned by Google and now, for a variety of reasons, feedburner is not expected to be available much longer.

What we all apparently really, really want is a more global “Subscribe” capability, and surprisingly I am just not finding it. In fact, I have found out through experimentation that subscribing to a forum category is surprisingly limited in that it does not appears to include sub-categories. The only WordPress plugin I have found would require me to manually subscribe all who are to receive email concerning all updates, and that is just not scalable at all.

In the meantime you could use Firefox’s “Live Bookmarks”. Your tastes may vary, but I would not check Firefox’s “Always use Live Bookmarks to subscribe to feeds.” because I see user comments about that being a very difficult decision to undo. I have no experience at all with any of this RSS feed world, in spite of having daily frequented blogs and forums for decades.