Mostly I let forum threads age out naturally and just stop checking them after a while. But recently I've posted a couple where I'd really like to know when new responses come in, even if it happens months or years from now.
So, is there some way to "follow" a thread so that I can get an email notification when a new response comes in?
We don't offer e-mail notification for messageboard posts, but we do offer RSS feeds of all messageboard threads. Just click on the orange RSS icon on the upper right of any thread.
Thanks! That'll do nicely. I can do a little script to poll the threads in question periodically -- say, once every 8 hours or so -- and notify me if any get new posts.
In the course of writing my own script, I noticed that Paizo's RSS feeds don't validate. They're missing an ID element and a rel="self" atom:link attribute on the FEED element. Check out the validation results for this thread's RSS on the W3C feed validator for full details.
This wasn't a problem for my own fairly dumb little script, since I'm just parsing it as XML rather than RSS specifically. But the missing elements can cause stricter RSS readers to choke.
Fixing it should be simple -- just stick the feed's own URL into it in a couple places. Easy.
Are there still no plans to support following a thread? I'd like something that works on a faster basis than RSS (unless you're okay with me hitting your site every 10-20 minutes...). Additionally, have you reconsidered email notifications? It could be a lot of email, but there are services these days that make that kind of thing feasible.
(would edit my post but don't seem to be able to... another feature request...)
Adding on to my previous post, RSS is a really poor solution for following a lot of threads due to the maintenance onus on the user doing the subscribing. If I'm following several threads, then it makes sense to make it easier for me to see which ones have been updated all in one place. Most other forums provide this, it's an obviously valuable feature.
