would it be possible to provide an admin page to;

list all of the
RSS feeds of a forum, and

provide a place to insert
feedburner urls and links for RSS and Email subscriptions, so that

Admins would have the option to use Feedburner urls in place of the provided links to RSS and email subscriptions, which would

Drasticly reduce the
server load on the SF forums internal RSS and email subscriptions.

You have Mail.

Hey Andy and Radio,

This thread seems to address what I'm trying to do — but your solutions went into private email so I thought I'd post and ask if you would be willing to share some results of your Feedburner endeavor.

I've set up simple:forum on a site I'm in process of building for a non-profit (Haven't launched yet –still in progress so ignore content!) and their biggest request was that I make it so that their forum activity comes automatically to them in email. They're used to yahoo and google groups where posts come to their inbox (and they reply that way too).

http://hearthfirespiritualalliance.org/home/forum/

Radio, did you ever get it to work the way you were wanting? Does it work to have members receive email for only the groups they have permissions for? I'm working on finding the best way to set this up so that each member has as little complication as possible (most aren't real computer literate beyond Yahoo groups).

I will be setting up the memberships for them (not making registration public), and I'd love to figure out the simplest way to set up the users so that they get any new posts made to their specific groups automatically, not just existing topics via subscription button.

Thanks so much!

Kat

RSS feeds can be used in conjunction with HTTP Authentication but I somehow doubt that is going to easily fit into the WP world. I will be looking into it at some stage.

Thanks very much for the directions. This info is what I was looking for.

Hello again,

I just about had things working… I set up an individual feed for the associated URLs for each forum and provided subscription links. However, today feedburner went quirky and was providing inconsistent data about subscriptions (showing the two test subscribers to the general forum group, but on the “my feeds” page declaring that I had zero subscribers to that same feed… also when attempting a new subscription it claimed the feed wasn't active but upon visiting the feed page, it showed that it was indeed active for email subscriptions).

Anyway, in effort to fix the issue, I deleted the feed and prepared to start over. My problem now (and why I'm posting here) is that I don't know how to get a URL for that forum group. I think I was able to get one before by clicking on the default RSS button that is coded into the forum structure. However, since we are doing email feeds only, I had my programmer friend disable (remove) the RSS icons next to the groups. I wrote to him to ask how I might go about getting a URL for the feed and here is what he suggested. I'm going to post what he wrote because actually it will help us in the long run with setting up all of the feeds. I'm still not sure whether how I have them set up is working at all (no emails have arrived to the test subscribers), so if you have any additional insights on how to coordinate this with simple:forum I'd be very grateful. I'm supposed to go live with this site in a few days.

QUOTE:  “I would ask the guys on simpleforum [support] what is the algorithm the forum software uses to name an RSS feed — it's going to be a specific URL with the addition of some identifier at the end for each individual feed - like in WP a category feed has something like:     name.xml?”cat_id=7″   sort of appendage.   Each one of those is an individual feed and can be subscribed to.  You have to find out how SimpleForum does it and take it from there. If it gets overly technically complicated for you applying that to HFSA's forum layout, let me know what they said & i will help.”

Thanks Andy and Radio for any assistance you might be able to post. Much obliged.

~Kat

Thanks! Will see how it goes. Have you had any reliability issues with Feedburner?

Kat

The group feed worked great as far as I can tell. The individual forum feeds, however, are another story.

I found the feed strings inside the forum admin, and they match the examples you provided yesterday (as best as I can tell). However, the strings won't validate. (Yours do, of course!

Yours: http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/support-forum?forum=simplepress-forum-faqs&xfeed=forum

Mine: http://hearthfirespiritualalliance.org/home/forum/?forum=hearth-fire-officers&xfeed=forum

(I put the www in there as well and it doesn't validate that way either)

Link to forum, should you need it: http://hearthfirespiritualalliance.org/home/forum/

Thank you,

Kat