Hi Petr, I looked at how some other web forums behave, and it seems to be a pretty normal procedure to only include one message from the thread directly in the RSS data.

You have to follow the link in the RSS item to see the entire thread.

RSS does not appear to be set up to deal with hierarchical data, it just contains single level deep list of "items", so that does not quite map exactly to the extended parent/child structure of forum / thread / message.

With just a single level of hierarchy, the closest thing for the forum is to show a list of threads, and send just one message of that thread as a kind of representation of it.

Other forums look like they may send the first message in the thread instead of the last one, I'm not sure which is better... But it seems like the last one might be good though so you at least don't always see the same message all the time.

Is there another forum that you use that has its RSS feed structured in a better way? If so let me know so I can check it out and see what it is doing.

It is possible to adjust some parameters in the way RSS feeds are retrieved from this forum - you can include a sort_created=Y parameter in the RSS url, like this:
http://moi3d.com/forum/threads_rss.php?webtag=MOI&sort_created=Y

That will cause the threads to be retrieved by their initial creation date order, instead of the order of their last posted message, and that method will also retrieve the first message of the thread instead of the last one. This mode may be interesting for people who want to aggregate the MoI forum into their own site.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I would like to use a RSS feeds data to archive an interesting messages so receiving the link (and text) of the last or first item in the thread doesn't meet my expectations...

>>Is there another forum that you use that has its RSS feed structured in a better way?

I use RSS feed from http://www.rhino3d.sk/rss.php - it is powered by phpBB - and I receive each message sent to any thread - full text, along image thumbnail if applicable, and link.

Petr

Hi Petr, I see - that must be an optional thing that you can configure in phpBB, the ones that I happened to try did not do that.

Do you have to login or something so it knows which messages you have not seen yet? I guess not since I can see the feed over here. Does it always grab the most recent 15 messages?


This forum does not have any built in function to do that, its current RSS implementation is focused on sending back threads and not individual messages.

To do what you want would require writing a custom feed, which is not horribly difficult but it is difficult enough that I probably won't be able to do it during this current forum tune-up though, sorry...

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>Do you have to login or something so it knows which messages you have not seen yet?
>>Does it always grab the most recent 15 messages?


No. My browser is set up to check that feeds for update each 10 hours and I always get the new messages only. Don't ask me how it knows which messages has already been sent, but the truth is I have never got any message twice or repeatedly.

Well, I think I can do without RSS feed. There are a couple of a new features built into this forum that I like it (e.g. "]" tag) and forum itself is really well arranged. Actually, I mainly use RSS reader in case of pages for which the "useful text info / useless graphics" ratio is very low.

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Don't ask me how it knows which messages has already been
> sent, but the truth is I have never got any message twice
> or repeatedly.

It must be based off of your IP address - it must keep an entry in its database for the last message sent to each IP address.

You mentioned before about wanting to make an archive of a message - if you are interested it would probably be fairly easy for me to put together a little "screen scraping" script which you could run to grab the contents of any one particular forum post into a local .htm file on your hard disk.

That would be done using this address, which allows for displaying a single message:
http://moi3d.com/forum/display.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1382.1


> There are a couple of a new features built into this forum
> that I like it (e.g. "]" tag) and forum itself is really well arranged.

Thanks! It's now pretty close to how I imagined it, kind of a hybrid between NNTP style (with the thread list column) and the regular web forum style.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I was reading something about RSS feeds today morning ... sorry for that mistake.

>>It must be based off of your IP address - it must keep
>>an entry in its database for the last message sent to each IP address.

Definitely not. The RSS for the forum of which link I posted as an example actually works something like (if I understand it well); it always aggregates fifteen items and sends them to RSS reader on request. Then my reader built in browser compares which items were sent during the last update, shows new items and discards ones which were treated before. But it also means I don't get all new messages in case there were more than fifteen new messages written by users before requesting for update.

I am accustomed to reading McNeel's forum via webpage. However if I want I can download particular message to my Opera's news/e-mail client by typing, e.g. nntp://news2.mcneel.com/rhino/280270 into the address bar.

So if you added "something" which allowed for downloading a particular message (optionally whole thread?) via RSS or NNTP, it would be great!

>>it would probably be fairly easy for me to put together a little
>>"screen scraping" script which you could run to grab the contents
>>of any one particular forum post into a local .htm file on your hard disk.

I think I should be able to do very similar thing myself by Opera's user scripting.
Generally speaking, I prefer you spent your working day on improving MoI instead :)

Petr

> So if you added "something" which allowed for downloading a
> particular message (optionally whole thread?) via RSS or NNTP,
> it would be great!

Hi Petr, I have tweaked the RSS feed so that it can take a msg=x.y parameter in the URL, where x = thread id and y = message number in thread.

So for example to retrieve just this message here through RSS, you would use this address: http://moi3d.com/forum/threads_rss.php?msg=1362.14

So I think that should cover the basic part of what you wanted?


re: (optionally whole thread?) - unfortunately this one would take a fair amount more work, as the current RSS code is centered on the idea of a list of threads and not a list of messages.

re: NNTP - doing it through NNTP would be way way more difficult yet since that is a completely different protocol at the server level (different TCP port and everything), it would take a lot of custom work to serve out forum pages through NNTP requests.

Anyway, I hope that the new RSS tuneup works for you.

- Michael

Also I made a change so that the message content in the RSS feed keeps its HTML.

Previously all the HTML tags were being stripped out which also removed line breaks, kind of changing everything into one big glob of text.

I think this should work better, but please let me know if you run into any problems with the RSS feed after this.

- Michael