The forum I run has a mix of public and private (member-only) categories. Right now, if you allow RSS feeds to be generated for a particular category, EVERYONE can view them, even people who don't have access to those categories. I would really love it if we could have some RSS feeds generated only if you enter your forum username and password to authenticate. Then you would be able to access RSS feeds for all of those categories you have access to. As it stands, I can only offer RSS feeds for the public categories because I don't want everyone to see the posts in the private area.

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Very useful feature was going to propose this as well.

One problem I see with this, especially from the support side, RSS feed readers won't know how to pass login credentials to an RSS feed. User's would add the feed to their feed reader, have problems, and submit support tickets - the feed would only be useful for someone who has bookmarked it in their browser and visit it in a web page - in which case, why not just visit the site?

It's not a problem, really. You use HTTP authentication to control access to a given feed. Several sites I know use RSS authentication and most readers handle authentication without issue.

One example of how it is done:

http://daringfireball.net/2005/02/feed_authentication

IPB supports http authentication (although a few of the readers I've used do not ;) )

One problem with THAT idea however, is then you're rebuilding htaccess files (I see problems with that in the event a user has already made or modified one - changes could get wiped out, or duplicated), and another problem with that is I'm not positive you can do an htaccess http authentication protection against a url with GET variables.

i.e. I could do it against

index.php

but not

index.php?act=rssout&blah=1

I'm no programmer, so I might be barking up the wrong tree, but could you create a special RSS directory with files for each of the different RSS feeds? This would allow you to edit a custom .htaccess file in the RSS directory and not have to muck about with the main forum .htaccess file.

how about using php instead of htaccess/htpasswd?
Only problem is it doesn't work on servers with php running in CGI mode...

http://us2.php.net/features.http-auth

<br>I'm no programmer, so I might be barking up the wrong tree, but could you create a special RSS directory with files for each of the different RSS feeds? This would allow you to edit a custom .htaccess file in the RSS directory and not have to muck about with the main forum .htaccess file.<br>

<br><br>This could work, but would seem to be a lot of work for such little advantage.<br><br><br>

<br>how about using php instead of htaccess/htpasswd?<br>Only problem is it doesn't work on servers with php running in CGI mode...<br><br><a href="http://us2.php.net/features.http-auth" target="_blank">http://us2.php.net/features.http-auth</a><br>

<br><br>Which would, unfortunately, knock off too many users to make it viable to use.<br><br>

Having password protected RSS feeds would be a big win for me and others, I am sure.

Perhaps something to consider for 3.0?