Any chance FPN will get RSS? It might help reduce the load on servers by preventing people from having to visit the site to check updated threads.

We looked into adding RSS before. It turned out that it would be quite unwieldy, I'm not sure why. Wim has been swamped with work, but I'm sure he'll give a better answer when he emerges.

RSS actually usually increases (rather than decreases) server loads.

I think you're assuming a poor implementation and excessive polling on the part of clients with no offloading to secondary services to cache requests.

I don't think this is necessarily the case if it is done properly. If the RSS feed is generated as a flat XML file periodically from new messages (say once every 15 or 30 minutes) then the operation of polling the RSS feed is nothing more than a simple HTTP GET of a static file; there are no per-GET database queries involved whereas there are always many DB queries involved when someone actually visits the site since these can't really be cached or delayed.

Furthermore, even the HTTP GET of the RSS XML can be offloaded onto other sites that cache the feed. Web based RSS readers will generally do this internally anyway; even if 1,000 people are using google reader to read the site's RSS feed, google reader will poll once periodically for all 1,000 people.

No fancy logic is really needed to create multiple feeds for different forums or anything either. Something like Yahoo Pipes could be used to implement this logic off server, though I'm not sure how intelligent Yahoo Pipes is about its caching.

No, I was actually thinking that in most cases, polling takes place at times when people might not otherwise be surfing. You don't really get to control how often a given client polls.

That said, a current XML feed on the for sale forum that's updated whenever someone starts a new topic would probably be a very good thing.

Yea, but you do get to control which clients CAN poll. For example, any such feed could be restricted to Yahoo Pipes exclusively and the URL not published. Heck, you could even not restrict it by IP and simply use a very obscure and unpublished URL that was only available to a single developer. This developer would then use that URL in conjunction with something like Yahoo Pipes, possibly create multiple other feeds, then allow the pipes URLs to be published. Result: almost all polling takes place at pipes and not at FPN. The only thing that can poll FPN is pipes (or whatever). Assuming decent caching on behalf of pipes or whatever other service, there'd be very little load introduced by this. And if the feed were a periodically generated static XML file then that would be even more load optimal.

I volunteer to help if anyone is interested. Just give me a "secret" RSS feed url and I'll track down whatever other services are needed to cache and redistribute it, then set them up.

Whether anyone would use this other than me I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to do the feed cache/redistribution work to find out if someone can provide me with a "secret feed" to experiment with.

I think an RSS feed would be great. I'm in -- as far as being a user.

Doug

There still is a problem with RSS and the board software. Until that is fixed, or until we find a way around that problem, I don't think we will have an RSS feed.

Warm regards, Wim