RSS Feeds (Experimental)

[Ronin Storm]

I'm just playing around with vB 3.6's functionality. One of the new features is the ability for the forum to grab RSS feeds and post them up automagically.

So, the experiment can be found underneath Games Chat, as RSS Feeds.

All feeds are posted by "RSS Feed Poster", who is the only user who can post new threads in that forum. All other users can only reply to threads in that forum.

The threads auto-close after 72 hours.

The feeds are currently updating on a 2 hourly cycle, but that may well change.

There are only two feeds in play at the moment:

1. Gamespot's PC channel
2. Gamespot's Xbox 360 channel

I don't think I want loads and loads of feeds to start with, but I'm prepared to throw in a handful more if you have game RSS feed suggestions.

Let me know what you think.

[edit]Responding to Haven's request...[/edit]

This new and marvelous forum is accessed by registering yourself for the "RSS: Games" usergroup in the usual way (User CP / Group Memberships). This makes a subscription-only forum, which seems to be the way people like things 'round 'ere.

 

[Haven]

I like the feature but it would be nice to put it in a group I can subscribe to so it doesnt spam my "new posts" with all the rss posts.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Hmm, good idea. Let me look at that.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Right, sorted. I'll put details in the original post.

 

[BiG D]

It's a good idea, but I think those feeds are much too active. Looks like it's pulling around 4 or 5 stories per hour? 4 or 5 a day might be ok, but right now it's just excessive.

Anyone know of another site that would have a similar feed, but with less updates?

 

[KillCrazy]

If you can only see them by registering to that usergroup, does that mean super moderators like myself will always see the new posts?

 

[Ronin Storm]

Super Mods currently see pretty much everything (bar a couple of closed-group private forums). I can change that for the RSS Feeds forum, though it may be less of an issue if we choose less mentally active feeds.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Thanks for that feedback, Big D.

I've tweaked both feeds so that only items that contain the following words will be posted up:

Review
Preview
Hands-On
Release
gold
Impressions
Patch
demo
trailer

That should pull in a fair number of interesting articles without getting the flood of "screens" and "gameplay movies". What I really wanted was to be able to explicitly exclude articles based upon words, but that's not the way it works.

I've also deleted all items that I believe the feed would now not fetch, so the list looks much more sensible. Unfortunately, Gamespot goes to sleep over the weekend so it's difficult to tell what will be posted or not...

Still open to new feeds, or further tweaks on the to-be-included words.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Some further tweaking.

Removed "trailer" from the allowed words list as this seemed to be swamping the RSS channel with "Official Trailer 407" or whatever... too many damn trailers! Deleted all threads that would have been created because of that filter.

Considering removing "hands-on", "patch" and "impressions" too. Thoughts?

 

[BiG D]

Patch would be fine, if it hadn't went and created a new thread for every single language of the new wow patch... :/

 

[Ronin Storm]

Introversion's forum RSS added to RSS feed.

Shortened thread title tags for Gamespot feeds to [GS PC] and [GS X360]. Introversion needs no tag as they tag their forum posts helpfully already.

iV appear to have a much better feed than Gamespot. Tempted to massively cutback the GS feeds and look for other more interesting channels.

 

[Ronin Storm]

I've now gutted the Gamespot feeds. They're likely to be much cleaner in future. The only words they will pull in are:

Review
Preview
Release
gold

So, hopefully, we should just get decent stuff, not links to downloads that if you're not a subscriber you can't get anyhow.

Looking for better feeds still. Suggestions welcome.

 

[BiG D]

Silly IV, they don't even have a post announcing the game has been released...

 

[Ronin Storm]

Currently looking at the Black Cat Games feed (specially enabled just for me ). They run vBulletin too, but I really just want to pull out news posts, not every question or random post and it may turn out that I can't tell the difference. Need a way to only pick out posts by Mods or Developers or something...

 

[Ronin Storm]

Just keeping people up to date on this...

The RSS feeds we have going currently are:

• Gamespot's PC channel (massively trimmed)
• Gamespot's Xbox 360 channel (massively trimmed)
• Introversion's News

I've not been able to pull a channel that I'd like from Black Cat Games as vBulletin doesn't yet support authenticated RSS feeds. When it does, I hope to add the Alien Swarm: Infested updates.

Still interested in looking at more channels, but this feature can be considered less experimental and more live now. Check out the "RSS: Games" usergroup if you're interested. There's, on average, only two or three posts a day from the feeds so it's not too much of a burden.