RSS feeds

[BankFodder]

As far as I can see the documentation, there is no indication as to how often the RSS feed is refreshed. Anyone have any idea on this please?

Also, I suggested this before – it will be very nice to be able to filter the RSS feed out to various sub- forums depending on words or phrases – either included or excluded/white listed or blacklisted.

But for the moment, any idea from anyone how often this feed is refreshed? I'm a bit surprised that one can't configure this

[bfarber]

Are you talking about importing an RSS feed, or the RSS exports the software generates?

[BankFodder]

I'm talking about importing feeds from external sources.

[BankFodder]

I'm sorry to say that the feed reader function that comes with Invision is extremely basic. It's almost as if it was thrown in as an afterthought.

I suppose that to an extent I'm influenced/spoilt by vBulletin which we moved from about a year ago.

However, vBulletin comes standard with quite a sophisticated feed reader.

You can set up a feed with multiple filters on it to include or to reject an item because of the inclusion or exclusion of various words or phrases.
You can decide how much of an extract of a particular source article you want to import.
You can designate an image/icon instead of merely a text prefix
you can also tell the feed that if X X X is satisfied then route to X X X sub- forum or if ZZZ is satisfied then route to ZZZ sub- forum.
You can also tell it to pin the post for a certain amount of time and then to unpin it.
You could also tell the feed how often to refresh itself.

I'm certainly a bit surprised about the inability to pin the thread and then to unpin it because pinning a new topic is offered as part of the new topic function on the invision forum and setting a lock/unlock time is also a standard part of the forum facility – so it seemed to me to be a bit strange that the RSS feed reader function doesn't take advantage of this.
 

Also, and it doesn't seem possible to give a specific name to a thread. It has to take its name from the source.

I know that RSS has rather fallen out of fashion – but it's an extremely useful way of keeping various parts of your forum up to date with relevant events – without any work or input from the site team. In fact with properly set up RSS feeds, you could go away on holiday for two or three weeks and the forum would robotically keep on bringing new feeds and distributing them round the site so that visitors would scarcely notice that nobody was in attendance.

Not only that, there are external services which are making a reasonable amount of money helping you create feeds and applying filters – but all of this could be done within Invision without too much difficulty, I imagine.

Edited May 27, 2020 by BankFodder

[bfarber]

Those features have simply never really been suggested to any capacity. Just because something can be done doesn't necessarily mean it is worth the development time to actually do them. And some of those features aren't currently possible either (for instance, there is no facility within our software to schedule a topic to be unpinned - pinning and unpinning must be done manually).

Anyways back to your original question, the task that imports RSS feeds runs every 15 minutes and will cycle through any feeds you have set up. If you have 4 feeds set up, it may be an hour in between each individual feed refreshing depending upon various factors, for example.

[BankFodder]

Well thanks for this answer. – Especially the information about the re-cycling of the feeds.

As for the rest of the post which I made, maybe they could be considered as feature suggestions for a forthcoming version.

Maybe one of the independent developers might like to consider a pin/unpin application which would be very handy.