RSS

[DaveS]

8.50 and there have been a few more posts and it has not upgraded on the the zebra website or the rss feed on my my bookmark bar, so it is definitely not working as it should

As I've said earlier I think the RSS feed only updates every hour, it's not constantly updating.

[barftone]

Nice weather don't you think....

[Whealie]

As I've said earlier I think the RSS feed only updates every hour, it's not constantly updating.

It is 10.48 and it has not updated on my rss bookmark but it has on the zebra website



Is it possible to make it update more regularly. I though the whole point of RSS was that you were kept upto date instantly of new posts?

[DaveS]

Right I've found some settings and some explanation of how syndication works in vB.
There is basically a cache which is updated every 60 mins, there are also limits which I've tweaked.
I've turned the cache down to 1 min refresh so we'll see what that does.

I also found that the XML syndication was turned off even though RSS syndication was turned on, as RSS is a type of XML I don't understand that one at all. I've turned it on anyway to see if it makes a difference.

[DaveS]

Here's the settings in the control panel it helps a little......

• Enable External Javascript
  This setting allows you to enable/disable the Javascript content syndication system that allows you to embed vBulletin data in HTML pages.
  
  If you set this option to 'yes', you can call it by going to:
  http://www.example.com/forum/external.php?type=js
  
  You could use javascript directly in your html pages to control the returned data.
• Enable RSS Syndication
  This setting allows you to enable/disable the RSS 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0 content syndication system.
  
  If you set this option to 'yes', you can call it by going to:
  http://www.example.com/forum/external.php?type=rss
  http://www.example.com/forum/external.php?type=rss1
  http://www.example.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2
  
  (example) There is a news-plugin, 'Good News', for Trillian which lets you use RSS feeds to get the latest information posted in your Trillian program.
• Enable Podcasting (RSS Enclosure)
  This option includes the first attachment of each thread as an enclosure within RSS 2.0 feeds. If the feed is requested with &lastpost=1 appended to the url then the first attachment of the last post in the thread will be included. This is the method by which Podcasting is enabled for your forum. iTunes specific settings are configures per forum in the Forum Manager.
  
  The iTunes specific features will be only included if a specific forum is specified via the addition of &forumids=X where X is the forumid.
• Enable XML Syndication
  This setting allows you to enable/disable the XML content syndication system.
  
  If you set this option to 'yes', you can call it by going to:
  http://www.example.com/forum/external.php?type=xml
• Thread Cutoff
  This value controls how many days in the past that updated threads will be chosen from. Busy forums will want a smaller number. The smallest valid value is 1 day; the default is 30 days.
• Cache Lifespan
  This setting controls how long thread content will be cached. Valid settings are 1 to 1440, anything else will be treated as the default value of 60.
  
  vBulletin uses a an internal cache system as well as a http cache to lessen the load of calls to external.php.
• Maximum External Records
  This option limits the maximum amount of records that can be returned by the external data provider. By default 15 records will be returned. This option allows the user to tack on &count=X to their RSS feed to retrieve more records.

[DaveS]

Ok it's now obvious to me there is some sort of a problem.
Whether its a permission or some sort of configuration problem or a bug in vB's code or something else I don't know.
I've done enough experimenting though to see the issue now.

[DaveS]

After much scratching of heads and browsing vBulletin® - Instant Community I've decided that this all the way through has been working as designed.

First key point is that it was set to refresh each hour so you wouldn't have noticed changes within that time frame. I've now changed this down to 1 min.

Second key point is that the RSS feed only shows new threads it doesn't show new posts. So that's why even though there is forum activity it's not showing up as these will be replies to existing threads. vBulletin doesn't currently allow you to have an RSS feed of posts and I can't see any mods to do this either so what we've got is what we're stuck with.

So hope all of that helps!

[Whealie]

It is updating on the zebra website feed but not on my Firefox bookmark tab, where is still showing exactly the same as yesterday.

To be honest, I am only bothered about the zebra website, but even that does not work correctly. I have te MCN one set to show the top five, whci it does.

But no matter what I put in the xrv settings it only shows two (it is currently set to show ten). I have added the BBC feed set on ten too to show what should happen.

It seems to me that it is worth the site having its rss feeds working from other websites as this will drive traffic and presumably help wth search engine optimisation?

[DaveS]

I have it working fine on my wordpress test blog.
Kwakafb’s Blog
If it's not working on yours then it's got to be the way that the RSS readers (widgets) are configured or something else is clashing with the widgets, other one's?
I've done nothing other than set-up a standard blog and that widget with the standard RSS url as specified before and it just works.
All of my other feeds have just been working as well.

[Whealie]

Dave,
I have RSS feeds from The Guardian (two), the FT and the BBC (two) on my firefox bookmark and they all work fine. The XRV has not updated since I installed it (I deleted it and reinstalled it).

It also does not work on a server installed Wordpress (Wordpress.org, not Wordpress.com) website when the Guardian and MCN do (I agree it does work on wrodpress.com blogs as I have tried it).

There may well be a solution involving me changing settings on the website and throwing away my mac and buying a PC, but the fact remains that the xrv.org.uk RSS feed does not work as simply (RSS = really simple syndication) as all others. That is not good.