RSS not working for me???

[jtorral]

When I follow the documented procedure, I get the following message:


This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.


and this:

-
<rss version="0.91">
-
<channel>
<title>AFO Automation - IS ToolFail</title>
<link>http://afodm1.al.intel.com/vbportal/forums</link>
-
<description>
This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin. To find out about vBulletin, go to http://www.vbulletin.com/ .
</description>
-
<item>
<title>Test entry in toolfail</title>
-
<link>
http://afodm1.al.intel.com/vbportal...16&goto=newpost
</link>
-
<description>
Forum: IS ToolFail
Posted By: Unregistered
Post Time: 03-30-2005 at 03:44 AM
</description>
</item>
-
<item>
<title>DB maintenance plan failed</title>
-
<link>
http://afodm1.al.intel.com/vbportal...15&goto=newpost
</link>
-
<description>
Forum: IS ToolFail
Posted By: Jorge Torralba
Post Time: 03-29-2005 at 01:31 AM
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>


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What am I doing wrong?

[Steve Machol]

The most likely explanation is that your do not allow Guests to view your forums. The RSS feed will only show threads that guests can view.

[DragonWarden]

Is there any way to have the RSS feed work even with forums that are locked from guests? My rationale is that I am setting up a site for my company's employees to post to, and obviously, I want to lock all access to the boards (both read and write) to only registered users. However, because I would also like them to be able to get notices of new posts without having to refresh the site a dozen times throughout the day, I would like to set up an RSS feed that they can have an instant messenger check. Maybe, if they see a subject line that they are interested in, they will click on it, which will bring up the page with the login (if they're not already logged in from a prior session), and then they can enter their username/pass to actually see the posting. Is there an easy way to do this?

[Colin F]

That'd require code modification, sorry.

[DragonWarden]

Would it be such a bad feature to have anyway in the general VBulletin release?

[Colin F]

As far as I know, RSS doesn't allow any kind of authentication, thus it would be a security hole.

[DragonWarden]

It wouldn't be authenticating from the RSS side. I'm capitalizing on the fact that, even if you try to access a particular message in the forums by the URL directly, unless you have logged in recently, it will prompt you for a login before it will allow you to view the message. Since the RSS headline only contains a link which tries to open up the page in a webbrowser, the forums should prompt you for a user/pass if the cookie from your last login is no longer valid, right? In fact, that was how I had assumed your RSS syndication would work in the first place, and had to do a bit of searching before I discovered Steve Machol's tidbit of information. I can understand your reasoning behind your current RSS scheme...but was wondering if it's a limitation that's not necessary.

[Zachery]

Only standard RSS does not provide extra data, RSS2 does provide a preview of the text and more infrmation.

[DragonWarden]

Aah, thanks for pointing that out. I can see how some might have an issue with that.

I'm certainly not going to press the issue - I can comment out the conditional myself if I really want. But just as a last note, I would think that if someone *really* doesn't want guests to see even that one-liner desc in RSS2, they can just turn off the RSS syndication. I don't see the point of anyone turning it on in the first place if they really want to lock that down, while those who *do* want to turn it on are those already willing to take that slight leakage of information in return for the convenience to their users. But, I certainly can't predict the mindsets of all users, and no doubt there will be someone who has a different opinion from mine. Thanks for all of your prompt responses.