[#IT-108] Forum aggregation setup and documentation - FITS

IT Infrastructure

Forum aggregation setup and documentation

Created: 01/Jun/10 03:07 AM Updated: 02/Jun/10 06:51 AM

Component/s:

Forum

Affects Version/s:

None

Fix Version/s:

None

Security Level:

Public (Everyone can see this issue)

Time Tracking:

Not Specified

Description

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To keep tabs on the issues our userbase are facing, let's try to document how one can easily follow what's going on in our community forum using the built-in aggregation facilities of the forum software.

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ermo | Rune Morling added a comment - 01/Jun/10 03:09 AM

Derrick,

You mentioned a plugin that exposes the feeds of subsections – can you coordinate installing it with stef?

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devnet added a comment - 01/Jun/10 03:09 AM

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=376 is the plugin.

I have no access whatsoever to the forum.

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devnet added a comment - 01/Jun/10 03:10 AM

assigning to stef to make this change...

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ermo | Rune Morling added a comment - 01/Jun/10 03:14 AM - edited

Monitoring via Atom/RSS

In the mean time, you can manually set up an Atom/RSS feed of a board / sub-board by adding

&type=atom;action=.xml  (Atom - recommended)
&type=rss;action=.xml   (RSS - deprecated)

to the URL of the board you want to monitor.

For instance, if I wanted to monitor the Development -> QA and Package Testing sub-board (http://forum.foresightlinux.org/index.php?board=21.0) I'd modify it to read Atom feed of Development -> QA and Package Testing sub-board (http://forum.foresightlinux.org/index.php?board=21.0&type=atom;action=.xml)

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ermo | Rune Morling added a comment - 01/Jun/10 03:38 AM

Monitoring via e-mail

In your profile, SMF supports setting up notifications on both specific topics and entire boards (or sub-boards – see the NOTIFY link at the top right). These notifications are sent via e-mail, so if your profile is configured correctly, you'll be able to receive updates in your inbox on new topics.

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ermo | Rune Morling added a comment - 01/Jun/10 10:52 PM - edited

Having played around a little with the Atom feeds, I have the following observations:

It struck me as odd that I would only see the 5 latest posts to a board. I think that's not quite enough and would prefer a little more to be shown by default – I would suggest trying something like (the last couple of weeks XOR n) <= k – whichever is bigger wins while staying below a realistic value of k.
It appears that the posts are truncated to x characters. I'd definitely prefer if the full text of posts was shown, although I am not interested in having images in my feed (they should just be converted to a clickable link instead for bandwidth saving).