RSS Feed

[The Old Man]

Yeah, I didn't see that one coming. Perhaps there should be an itemised list for Admins to review for awareness of depreciated features so that they can see what they need to plan for before upgrading.

I just can't get my head around this one. A global RSS feed from a message board must be considered a stock feature these days, surely. Why would they take the time to provide RSS per forum but not remove the global feed? My Twitter account hasn't updated via Hootsuite for weeks.

Not good IPS, please can you reconsider for future releases!

Many thanks.

[Durango]

I cant believe there is no global rss feed but only feeds for categories

I just asked the support, they must have a solution

There are global rss feeds on all existing forum solutions, it must also exist on IPB

[Durango]

Their answer :

Hello,

 

Sorry, the global RSS feed was removed for the Forums application. There is not currently an innate solution for this.

 

There may be something in our Marketplace that could help solve your issue. Alternatively you can head over to the Community to find out if any other admins have a solution for you.

 

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

[The Old Man]

That's not good. No way I can afford that mod in the Market Place to replace what should be a basic, standard included facility.

[Ralf Herrmann]

It might be that you are reading the support answer wrong. It says there is currently no solution for this. That is all that the support staff can say. Such features aren’t put back in overnight and therefore can’t be resolved with a support ticket. So the support can only say: the feature is not there at the moment. If you need it instantly, you need to look elsewhere. 

As a short-term solution for feeding your content to social media channels or other sites where you control the import: just google “merge rss feeds” and you will find plenty of services, which allow you to take our individual feeds and merge them to a global feed. 

Personally, I would also have to disagree about “global RSS feeds” being standard. RSS is on the decline for years. All major players like Twitter or Facebook have shut down their RSS export functionalities. Yahoo is shutting down RSS Pipes. Google has killed their RSS reader system and so on and so forth. As a medium to reach your subscribers, it doesn’t have a future. And exchanging data between services is now mostly done through APIs and services such as IFTTT. This provides much more advanced possibilities than plain RSS.  

That being said …
We do have the request for global RSS feeds on our internal tracker and are discussion options. Our developers have already come up with some great ideas, which wouldn’t just bringt the customizable feed exports back, but in fact might make it better than ever before. But since that is part of some bigger changes/improvements, it will take some time. 

[NoGi]

Personally, I would also have to disagree about “global RSS feeds” being standard. RSS is on the decline for years. All major players like Twitter or Facebook have shut down their RSS export functionalities. Yahoo is shutting down RSS Pipes. Google has killed their RSS reader system and so on and so forth. As a medium to reach your subscribers, it doesn’t have a future. And exchanging data between services is now mostly done through APIs and services such as IFTTT. This provides much more advanced possibilities than plain RSS.  

IFTTT is the reason I need my global RSS feeds back. Are you saying I can do the same with IFTTT (push to twitter and FB) via api or some other mechanism?

 

 

 

 

[emsonline]

Perhaps a new automatic feature such as "Post new content to Facebook/Twitter" would solve a lot of issues/concerns?

[Lab Rats Rule]

I don't even have any feeds showing.  Heck I would merge them if I had anything,  I am panicked, this will destroy my sites business.  I don't have time.

What has happened here while I was away for a bit?  Support takes eternity unless you pay extra.  The admin CP has been neutered,    Many questions sit unanswered on the forums.  This place is falling to pot,

[The Old Man]

Lab, you can enable RSS feed per forum, so you could use a third party RSS merge solution as suggested, but it's just too time consuming for Admins who have dozens of forums they need to grab the RSS feed from.

Then of course, if IPS change the URL of the feed at any time as sometimes happens, you would have to start from scratch again in whatever RSS merge solution you opted for.

So we have few options as I see it:

• Pick just one forums from which to draw new posts/topics via RSS and syndicate to Twitter, Facebook etc.
• Use a third party RSS Merge facility to draw new content from multiple forums if feasible and it's manageable to do so.
• Purchase the rather expensive (for some) RSS mod in the Market Place, which for some Admins with other paid for mods escalates the cost of IPS even higher.
• Wait and hope IPS restore the option to create a global RSS feed, meanwhile sadly our Twitter and social media feeds will be dormant.

Twitter and Facebook may have removed support for RSS export but they are two websites out of millions that provide RSS feeds, and they have complicated APIs and simple widgets to export and embed content.

Surely if RSS is a depreciated feature that's going the way of the dinosaur, they wouldn't have provided us with RSS output per forum, or retained RSS import for forums and blogs and instead would have left those features to be Marketplace mods.

The really frustrating thing for me is understanding why they coded RSS output per forum, surely it's not too much extra work to make a global feed from them in the software. The other is the assumption that IPS customers will not notice or miss it, or plain don't need it.

Totally agree with you re the AdminCP being neutered, for me IPS4 is in danger of becoming the 'Windows Vista' of IPS releases, it looks great, but requires much higher system resources to work for some reason and is a bitter/sweet upgrade and experience for Admins and users.

 

 

 

 

[Lab Rats Rule]

Lab, you can enable RSS feed per forum, so you could use a third party RSS merge solution as suggested, but it's just too time consuming for Admins who have dozens of forums they need to grab the RSS feed from.

Then of course, if IPS change the URL of the feed at any time as sometimes happens, you would have to start from scratch again in whatever RSS merge solution you opted for.

So we have few options as I see it:

• Pick just one forums from which to draw new posts/topics via RSS and syndicate to Twitter, Facebook etc.
• Use a third party RSS Merge facility to draw new content from multiple forums if feasible and it's manageable to do so.
• Purchase the rather expensive (for some) RSS mod in the Market Place, which for some Admins with other paid for mods escalates the cost of IPS even higher.
• Wait and hope IPS restore the option to create a global RSS feed, meanwhile sadly our Twitter and social media feeds will be dormant.

Twitter and Facebook may have removed support for RSS export but they are two websites out of millions that provide RSS feeds, and they have complicated APIs and simple widgets to export and embed content.

Surely if RSS is a depreciated feature that's going the way of the dinosaur, they wouldn't have provided us with RSS output per forum, or retained RSS import for forums and blogs and instead would have left those features to be Marketplace mods.

The really frustrating thing for me is understanding why they coded RSS output per forum, surely it's not too much extra work to make a global feed from them in the software. The other is the assumption that IPS customers will not notice or miss it, or plain don't need it.

Totally agree with you re the AdminCP being neutered, for me IPS4 is in danger of becoming the 'Windows Vista' of IPS releases, it looks great, but requires much higher system resources to work for some reason and is a bitter/sweet upgrade and experience for Admins and users.

 

 

 

 

Found them buried in no mans land.  Well, I will be merging away since I have no choice.  My forum business goes down tremendously without feeds.  This is the only thing that keeps people in IPS forums vs. FB.  IPS will be going the way of the dinosaur at this rate.  Bad form,IPS.

[Lab Rats Rule]

Old man, I am double posting because the reply box got buried mid typing on my IPad. So this explains why I had to turn my server PHP mem setting to -1...  I have 4 GB of memory.  I feel for everyone else.

I adopted a forum with 700 members, besides my first one,  and the folks took off to FB before I got it due to an absentee admin that just shut stuff off instead of fixing it. Email was one....  I need FB feeds to get them back.  I am about to train a full time FB mod to manage sharing on FB and stuff for now.  And to provide fresh content there.

 You seem smart, I am at a standstill with issues.  Any chance you can help in a message or something?

[Durango]

Hi

Well lets hope there will soon a release with the global rss feature back

@Ralf Herrmann : Thanks for your answer, you say Twitter and Facebook shut down their rss feeds, maybe but those social networks are very different business models, you cant compare, do you know any major board solution without rss on the market ? no, there is only IPB, and thats a mistake in my opinion, also why give rss for forums , and no globall rss ? the majority of publishers need this global rss feed to show the last topics on their sites, you must know the boards are often only a part of the website, and many publishers use drupal + IPB or wordpress + IPB etc, RSS provides a simple solution to show feeds, if you dont offer this one, then what solution do you offer ?