RSS Feeds of the forums

[iansbrainstorm]

It would be nice if you could enable RSS feeds of the forums.

Thanks

Ian

[KevinH]

We had this at one time but it generated lots of greedy RSS readers to pound our server. You can subscribe via email and just filter the results to get a similar result.

[iansbrainstorm]

I don't understand. Were these all Zimbra users? How do you mean gready?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by iansbrainstorm

I don't understand. Were these all Zimbra users? How do you mean gready?

This is an open forum so it could have been anyone with an RSS aggregator. Some people just set them to refresh too frequently and they take a lot of bandwidth.

[iansbrainstorm]

And ironicaly Zimbra is a feed reader

[KevinH]

It was the various feed aggregators. Some of them were polling multiple times a second. Tried to block a few IP's but it became too many to block or try to limit. There are other ways to track the forums so we recommend you use those. Yes Zimbra does include a basic feed reader but it doesn't poll that often.

[iansbrainstorm]

I wonder what impact that has on other sites. What is needed is a middle man to read the forum feed then people get their feeds from the dedicated feed site. I am sure there is something like that where people can not poll your forums directly. I use Newsgator which does this and only polls once per hour and if everyone was using Newsgator then your site would just get the one hit but not everyone would do that. The other option is to password protect the feed and that would slow down the people that don't understand how to setup a aggregator but as you say this is an open forum. In time I guess these issues will have to be resolved. If someone is hitting your site multiple times a second I would suggest that it is malicious as no aggregator would come out of the box like that.