Subscribing to these forums with an RSS reader

[Chris]

VBulletin supports RSS subscriptions.

To subscribe to the RSS feed, use the following link:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/external.php?type=rss

[Aaron]

You can also search the FAQ (upper left) for "RSS" to find this article:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/cirrus/vbulletin/faq.php?s=&do=search&q=rss&match=all&titlesonly=0

[Pete]

Unfortunately the RSS feed seems to be unreliable -- it only sends some of the forum posts. IMO this makes the feature useless because I still have to log in to check for new posts.

A recent example is the topic "User interface oddities"
http://www.scootersoftware.com/cirrus/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61
where there are two posts but the RSS feed only contains one (which you can verify in Firefox by clicking on the orange icon on the right side of the Address Bar).

It would be nice if there was a solution for this (with a vBulletin "extension" or something).

[Craig]

Pete,

The RSS feeds appear to only be on a thread-by-thread basis; it doesn't get updated when new comments are added to existing threads. The built-in support for email allows you to subscribe to get emails any time a thread you started or commented in has a new comment added, and you can manually subscribe to individual threads.

Other than being a moderator there isn't a built-in way to get an email every time a new comment is posted in a particular forum, but Chris is going to check if there's a way for us to easily add that as a new subscription option.

[Aaron]

With the currently available tools, you can:

Go to My Settings, Edit Options, Messaging and Notification section, and for Default Thread Subscription mode select Instant Email Notification.
This is how any thread you respond or create is automatically added to your subscribed list, and you will receive email notifications automatically.

You can also also manually subscribe to any thread without responding in it by Viewing it, then selecting Thread Tools (upper right area of the top Message Body) and say Subscribe to this thread. When this option is selecting, you will then be presented with the option to receive Instant Email Notification.

Under My Settings, Subscriptions, you can manually select subscriptions and change their email notification policies from the Drop down menu in the lower right.

[Pete]

Aaron, thanks for the tips. However, I miss the ability to receive either an email or an RSS item for *every* post to the forums, and without me needing to manually subscribe to every topic. Besides, if I need to log into the forums to manually subscribe to topics every day, then what's the use of an email or RSS feed?

Well, yes I know that it's good for monitoring topics in which I've posted, but IMO that's only part of the solution. Are there no extensions or options for vBulletin to change this behavior? That seems a little sad.

What will happen is that I won't monitor the forum as much because of the inconvenience, maybe once per week instead of daily. I know that in the Big Picture, it doesn't matter how often Pete visits the forums :), but I just think that this would be a nice feature to have.

[Aaron]

We are looking into other solutions (3rd party plug-ins, forwarding). These are the tools that are built-in and currently available. :)