RSS feeds for GalCiv forums

Looking to try them out

from GalCiv2 Forums

I've avoided RSS feeds for I don't know how many years now, mostly because it I didn't feel like jumping on yet another new cyberspace fad.

I've noticed the RSS feed button on the GalCiv2 forums for quite some time... or at least I thought I did.  Tonight I was in the mood to finally give this RSS thing a try.  So I went to the forums as usual, and I can't find an RSS Feed button anywhere.  I found a post made less than a day ago telling someone else to use the GalCiv2 feeds though.

Did I just have bad timing and catch the forums off-gaurd?  I know a lot of maintenance has/is being done.

Would anyone mind giving the a quick intro to setting up an RSS feed for this site in IE7?

Thanks

off-topic
38,332 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

The RSS feed buttons are located all over the place.

On the main forum page https://forums.galciv2.com/ at the bottom of the page at there's a link for "More Recent Posts" and to the right margin of this is a RSS feed button that if you mouseover tells you it's the RSS for the last 10 recent posts.

If you go to the Recent Posts list https://forums.galciv2.com/recent then at the top right you'll see a RSS feed button that tells you it's the RSS for *all* Recent Posts.

Finally if from the main forum page you select an individual forum, say GalCiv II for example then at the top of the Pinned Posts section again on the right is RSS feed for the GalCiv II Pinned posts. If you scroll down further to the GalCiv II Recently Active Posts there's an RSS feed for those as well. The other forums are similar as well.

However what you can do with these and how you go about using them is an entirely different matter. A friend of mine did produce a "forum scraper" using the RSS feeds but a couple of things makes it less than ideal. One is that you need a server to "host" the code and the other is that what it actually produces is an html file containing links to the individual articles. It then seems that you access each article by clicking on each link but that opens up your browser separately for each article and there's no way to navigate normally within your browser from one article to the next, however, my understanding of this entire process is very limited so I could be completely wrong in my assumptions. I will also be very interested in seeing what kind of response you get or in hearing about any results you come up with.

My ideal situation would be to have what appears to me to be identical to the current forums only with some control as to what forums I could exclude from my view. I have no idea of how to get to that goal.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Ah the small grey buttons... I didn't notice the grey-on-grey lettering on the buttons until I happened to lean real close to my monitor.

I'll give it a whirl; from the sounds of it we're aiming for the same ideal outcome.  As fas as needing a server, I kinda figured since RSS was built into IE7 I wouldn't have to bother with all that, we'll see.

Or I'll just wait to get hit with a clue bat.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I was hoping for some better response to this.

Some folks from Wincustomize have suggested something to this effect a number of times. I guess it's supposed to be easy. However no one seems to be forthcoming with any helpful suggestions.

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I was expecting and hoping for a bigger response too.

I was able to get it set up using Google's reader, which was pretty quick and painless.

The problem, however, is that it seems to grab only new posts, so it's not useful for also monitoring when a topic has a new reply... making it pretty much useless.

At least as far as I can tell.

Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I saw where someone had suggested a widget to monitor the RSS feed I'm going to give that a shot tomorrow. If I can get that kind of widget on ObjectDock+ that is. I'm still new to this widget thing myself ;) .