What RSS feed do I want to use?

[ilssac]

So I am trying to give these new forums as much a chance as possible.  I am really feeling the loss of the NNTP news feed as I have discused elsewhere.

E-mail is serious lacking in that the messages are largely unintelligable without real improvement.

My next step was to look at the RSS feeds and I am presented with 6 choices with only their titles and links to go on to disgingish between options.  So what do I want to use and why would a user choose 'All Content RSS Feed" over the "Discussion Messages" or maybe the "Discussion Threads"?

Is this discussed somewhere?

RSS FEED OPTIONS

All Content RSS Feed:
Announcements:
Discussion Messages:
Popular Discussion Threads:
Discussion Threads:
Unanswered Threads:

[Curt Wrigley]

I suggest you subscribe by forum.   That way you can point ther rss feed to a different folder or section of your rss reader for each forum you want to monitor.

To do that; open any forum and at the bottom of the thread list will be an rss link icon.   subscribing to that will do an rss sunscription to that forum only.  Point it to what ever read you want.  repeat with any forums you want to monitor.

Subscribing to ALL forums would be overwhelming.

[ilssac]

Well that just adds to the question, what the heck is the differenece between this link at the bottom of the forum that does bring up a single RSS feed and the link on the right of the forum that brings up a chocie of 6 feeds?

[Curt Wrigley]

If you are viewing a thread in the bottom left is an rss feed icon.  That will subscribe you to the threads in that forum only.

The RSS icon in the right column is for the entire adobe forums.  Clicking on it will reveal several options for subscribing to specific filters of all the threads in all the forums.   (like poplar discussions, open threads, etc...) I suggest the later will be information overload.

But; try them; they poulate your reader almost instantly and they are easy to remove if you no longer want them.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Ian, I'll join you in your confusion about which choice of RSS feed to go for, for each individual forum.

All Content (per specific forum) would, I would have thought, be the logical choice, in order to read all posts, however that appears to miss a large number of posts which Discussion Messages feed picks up.

Which feed choice will pick up all of the posts for a specific forum?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Ok, I think I've got it sussed.

All Content will show all of the threads... but if there are 2 or more consecutive posts on the same thread, without someone posting on another thread in the same forum in between, it will only show the last of those posts. It's tidier (no Re: all over the place) but it misses a load of posts.

Discussion Messages (which is one of the feeds listed down the sidebar but not on the main listing) will show all of the posts, regardless of posting sequence, so appears to be the best for getting everything.

So if you have threads A and B and post sequence A1, A2, B1, A3, B2, A4, A5, B3.

All Content will show A2, B1, A3, B2, A5, B3 and it'll miss A1 and A4.

Discussion Messages will show A1, A2, B1, A3, B2, A4, A5, B3.

Anyone else as confused as I am?!

[Guest]

Anyone else as confused as I am?!

I am now!  

[ilssac]

Color me confused as well.  I've been using the "ALL CONTENT" RSS and I believe you are correct, I am not getting all the messages.  So I guess I will try the 'DISCUSSION' thread.

Boy it sure would be nice if the RSS page that lists all these options contained something like a FAQ that explained what the different options are and why one might choose one over the other.  I wonder when somebody will invent a concept like that for web applications?