RSS feed not working

[BillB]

Limor/Pedro,

The Robosavvy RSS feed does not seem to work anymore. Any chance of getting it fixed?

BillB

[limor]

http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss.php

seems to work

parameters:
c= number of posts
f= forum id

[BillB]

Ah, I see the problem now.

Both Firefox, Safari & Google Reader were looking at the following URL by default:

http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss.php?t=1

Which is now an empty feed (although it was working fine up until the 24 November).

Manually changed the URL to the one you suggested & all works fine now.

Thanks

[limor]

thanks for that!

I changed the overall header to have the rss link without t=1
so now in firefox when pressing the rss logo on the top next to the URL, it works ok.

[PedroR]

Hi

It was me who made this change but I did not notice the forum was advertising this URL for the RSS by default.
Thank you for pointing that out.

Previously using t=1 made the RSS display the top level threads ONLY (not replies).

However I changed the meaning of the parameter so that "t" is now used to select a thread ID: t=[threadID] lets you subscribe a specific thread via RSS.

The old behavior of t=1 can now be achieved by using http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss.php?topicsOnly=1

Here is a summary of all options available:
?topicsOnly=1 - will only display the top Level threads (no replies). If this is not specified, both new Topics and Replies to existing topics are shown.
?t=[threadID] - will display the thread and the replies in the specified thread id. if not specified, all threads are shown.
?f=[forumID] - will subscribe a specific forum. If this is not specified posts in all forums are shown.
?c=[numberOfPosts] - will only return the latest [numberOfPosts]. Defaults to 30 and the maximum is 200.

Some examples:
1) Subscribing to a Thread: http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss.php?t=1341
(this example subscribes to the HaViMo Vision Module thread).

2) The above parameters can be combined with each other (for example ?f=15&topicsOnly=1 will only display new topics for the Robobuilder forum).

Regards
Pedro.

[tempusmaster]

All of that is fine, and you can certainly change the rss format to anything you like. Just keep in mind that all the people that previously subscribed to the feed are now getting nothing.

Of course, it will be a good test to see who is actually reading the feed and cares enough to make the effort to figure out what is wrong, especially since they won't read this thread about the problem unless they come directly to the forum because it is only going out on the new feed.

Hi

It was me who made this change but I did not notice the forum was advertising this URL for the RSS by default.
Thank you for pointing that out.

Previously using t=1 made the RSS display the top level threads ONLY (not replies).

However I changed the meaning of the parameter so that "t" is now used to select a thread ID: t=[threadID] lets you subscribe a specific thread via RSS.

The old behavior of t=1 can now be achieved by using http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss.php?topicsOnly=1

Here is a summary of all options available:
?topicsOnly=1 - will only display the top Level threads (no replies). If this is not specified, both new Topics and Replies to existing topics are shown.
?t=[threadID] - will display the thread and the replies in the specified thread id. if not specified, all threads are shown.
?f=[forumID] - will subscribe a specific forum. If this is not specified posts in all forums are shown.
?c=[numberOfPosts] - will only return the latest [numberOfPosts]. Defaults to 30 and the maximum is 200.

The above parameters can be combined with each other (for example ?f=15&topicsOnly=1 will only display new topics for the Robobuilder forum).

Regards
Pedro.

[PedroR]

Oh I see what you mean.
To say the truth the forum RSS is something that was long forgotten on Robosavvy (and did not work most of the time) and I fixed it when I came to work on Robosavvy.
However I did not think so many people used it. It's great that they do.

Also, the old format was a bit nonsense because t=XXX is the forum format to open a thread and there was no way on RSS to subscribe to a thread. That's why I changed it and I believe it makes more sense.

With regards to your (very valid) concern, I have made a fix for that.
- If you pass t=1 (the default URL to which all of you were subscribed) it will assume the old behaviour for legacy purposes and will work as it did before.

- If you pass a higher number in t=XXX it will show the RSS for a specific thread.


It is a bit of a hack but I believe it will fix the issue for all of you and still maintain that feature of being able to subscribe to threads.

As a side note, I strongly encourage you to _not_ use this t=1 (or the new threadsOnly=1) because you will miss out a big part of forum activity.
When these options are set they will only show newly created threads and not replies to existing threads.

Regards
Pedro.

[siempre.aprendiendo]

Here another quiet RSS user missing it

[tempusmaster]

Thanks Pedro. That's very helpful. And, thanks for fixing the feed. It's much better now, and more useful.

I'm not sure that it is technically possible, but if it is, you might consider sending out a message via the old feed every few days (once a week?) or so for a while giving old subscribers a heads-up and pointer to this thread so that they know to update their reader.

Oh I see what you mean.
To say the truth the forum RSS is something that was long forgotten on Robosavvy (and did not work most of the time) and I fixed it when I came to work on Robosavvy.
However I did not think so many people used it. It's great that they do.

Also, the old format was a bit nonsense because t=XXX is the forum format to open a thread and there was no way on RSS to subscribe to a thread. That's why I changed it and I believe it makes more sense.

With regards to your (very valid) concern, I have made a fix for that.
- If you pass t=1 (the default URL to which all of you were subscribed) it will assume the old behaviour for legacy purposes and will work as it did before.

- If you pass a higher number in t=XXX it will show the RSS for a specific thread.


It is a bit of a hack but I believe it will fix the issue for all of you and still maintain that feature of being able to subscribe to threads.

As a side note, I strongly encourage you to _not_ use this t=1 (or the new threadsOnly=1) because you will miss out a big part of forum activity.
When these options are set they will only show newly created threads and not replies to existing threads.

Regards
Pedro.

[PedroR]

Hi

With regards to sending out a message to the old feed specifically, it could be done but it adds a significant layer of complexity.

What I will do (and thank you for the suggestion) is make a new post/thread on the General forum warning about this.

Because the old feed only indexes NEW threads, this new thread will show up for old subscribers too.
Also, because the old feed (with t=1) is now fixed, old subscribers will get it.

I believe this may be a good compromise / solution.

Thank you and regards
Pedro.

[BillB]

Pedro,

The RSS feed is still not working quite right. Here are my observations:

1. Only new threads appear on the RSS feeds. Posts to an existing threads do not appear. For example, those who use RSS feeds will not be able to see this post!

2. There is alot of spam appearing on the RSS. I notice that most of these have been filtered out in the "New in Robosavvy Forum" panel on the web site - but all the spam appears on the RSS feed. Is there a way to remove the Spam from the RSS feed at the same time that they are removed from the "New in Robosavvy Forum" panel?

Bill

[i-Bot]

I'm hoping Limor or Pedro can do something about the spam. I am removing about 30 spam posts a day which are new topics, mainly from listshoes and nikecnshoes.
Don't know if there is a delay on topics going from post to RSS, the new in Robosavvy seems to update after about an hour.
Do you think it is the RSS feeds that the spammers are trying to access ?

[limor]

the rss.php script has stopped working for yet to be identified reasons. so for now http://robosavvy.com/forum/rss2.php works (t=1_title_only, c=articles, f=specific_forum)

new year's resolution includes updating the robosavvy.com site (joomla, oscommerce, phpbb), getting a new facelift template and web2.0 sites integration. blogs and feeds, installing a ticketing system (otrs) and most importantly, relocating and upgrading the server. we've been vps hosting at rackforce.com for few years and the reason to leave them is that that their price/performance is lagging behind. For example, Amazon EC2 would give about 5 to 10 times more resources (disk, bandwidth, cpu etc.) than rackforce for the price.
currently looking at VPS either from hostgator (which uses openVZ or virtuozo ie: shared kernel on the physical host and potentially unguaranteed resources) which provides 24 hr support and some real sysadmins that can help if there's are security problems or amazon EC2 (Xen virtualization "cloud" meaning 100% resources guarantee) but it means no human support and it means buying a separate license for cpanel/whm (linux administration system). decisions decisions..

[PedroR]

Hi BillB

ANOTHER BUG FIX

Sorry as I seem to have missed your last message on this thread (Dec 30).

I've been away from the forum for almost all of January with BETT and all the after Christmas craziness (yes, Christmas lasts through February for us in RETAIL with all sorts of crazy things).


In any case, I was re enabling the RSS feed on the right of the forum and noticed that when viewing rss.php it was only showing threads (not all the posts).

This is indeed a bug, and likely the bug BillB was reporting.

It has been fixed by now.


With regards to the SPAM on the RSS, this is not an issue with the website but instead with your reader caching the RSS feeds.
If your reader happens to be refreshing when there are SPAM posts, it will get those SPAM posts and cache them.
Later when we remove the SPAM, the RSS is updated immediately but on your computer, the readers don't seem to remove the cached posts.


This behavior is by design with the reader (not our website).
This happens for example with Internet Explorer. Even if you browse to the rss url manually, it will always fetch the cached posts and not a fresh RSS feed.

FYI we have new forum moderation tools in place now which are much more aggressive (they include, for example, a quick way to BAN a user at the same time you are deleting a post) so hopefully the issue with SPAM will be contained better now.


IN SUMMARY:

rss.php with no arguments shows all posts (new threads and replies to existing threads) on all forum

Argument t=1 makes it show only new threads (for LEGACY purposes)
Argument t=[THREAD_ID] will show the replies to a specific thread only
Argument f=[FORUM_ID] shows the RSS for a specific forum

There are other arguments that I detailed above. This is just a highlight on the most popular ones.

Regards
Pedro