RSS Feed to Threads

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    RSS Feeds offer a great opportunity to subscribe to a website and getting notified of related news. With Burning Board 4.1 we're adding the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and provide an automatic creation of corresponding threads.



    The registered feeds will be fetched periodically, the system supports a minimum of 10 minutes up to once every 24 hours. It optionally allows you to filter feeds by specific keywords, for example you're fetching a news site and want to skip everything except for entries related to "sports". The threads will be created in the destination forum using the specified user and can be associated with a specific language, unless multilingualism is disabled.


    In order to help you organizing the created threads, you can chose to close them automatically or to disable them, in the latter case every new thread requires approval from a moderator. Furthermore you can provide a list of tags which will be associated with the thread, helping you to create a logical connection between similar content and to tell these threads apart from other feeds.


    Quote from dethfire

    I think RSS to thread is a mistake. Google just sees this as thin content or spam.


    Then don't use it ;)


    But an RSS Feed Bot is a commonly requested function, many people want this feature. There are several good reasons for it, too. For example news feeds which are explicitly designed for re-use.

    "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" — Leonard Nimoy

    I'd like to see a no index meta tag option then. Duplicate content can be a problem with Google. Just recently I had to clean up a yahoo news feed I was importing for 7 years.


    I'm not going to make a big deal out of this, don't worry :)

    Not something I would personally use myself but have done in the past. Not a bad idea to have in the core though. Well done!

    For me, RSS to thread feature that I'm using in one of my sites (operating with vBulletin), is the most read section of my site. But to be honest I'm using a script which pulls the full article of RSS and not just a phrase. This way my members, in the same place, are reading the article and then discussing it.

    • Official Post
    Quote from ChrisTERiS

    But to be honest I'm using a script which pulls the full article of RSS and not just a phrase. This way my members, in the same place, are reading the article and then discussing it.


    The system does pull the entire RSS feed entry and most implementation provide almost the entire article. I have shortened the post visible on the screenshot, since it was for demonstration purposes only and I found it distracting to add a screenshot with a rather long post.

    Quote from Alexander Ebert

    The system does pull the entire RSS feed entry and most implementation provide almost the entire article. I have shortened the post visible on the screenshot, since it was for demonstration purposes only and I found it distracting to add a screenshot with a rather long post.


    Do you mean that (example) the provider gives only the first 4 line of the article and you're showing the full article? But is this legal? As I said, I'm already using such a method, but I think that I'm acting illegally.


    EDITED: eg this RSS http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss shows only a short description. Using my method, I'm showing in the post the full article (including images). I believe that this is something that will not makes CNN happy.

    • Official Post

    @ChrisTERiS It's not about scraping content, if the RSS feed provides less content, then less content is posted. The plugin does not attempt to fetch it directly from the source, it just makes use of the data provided in the RSS feed. This isn't illegal, since it is intentionally provided by the author.

    Quote from Alexander Ebert

    if the RSS feed provides less content, then less content is posted.


    Yes I know. And you're doing the right way. Pitty that most providers are giving away less content. For example the same Feed above, look how it appears in my forum (click any thread):
    http://www.christeris.net/vb422/forumdisplay.php?11-CNN


    Actually is not 100% illegal, as all links are still active and also the "Read More" link exist. But I'm pulling all the text.

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