Forum RSS feed

Wasn’t quite sure where to put this one.

I have the RSS feed running with the following url - http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml;limit=30
so in theory I should get all of the last 30 new/unread messages. The problem I am seeing is that when a topic is updated I get the updated message as expected, plus all the other messages for that topic for today. I’m using the Intraview News plugin for MS Outlook which worked perfectly with the previous forum site - with just the new messages being received.

Have I done something wrong in the above url?

I don’t think you’ve got anythign wrong, but isn’t this the way that RSS is supposed to work. If you ask for 30 messages in your URL you’ll get the most recent 30 messages each time you ask the server for an update. Your RSS client should then ignore any previously downloaded messages and display any new messages. It has to work this way because RSS is stateless. The server doesn’t know what you’ve downloaded previously. So it can’t make assumptions about what you need to download this time and therefore just sends you the last 30 messages. I don’t know why your client is displaying this differently to the previous forum. Perhaps there is a setting against each feed which defines how it works?

Incidentally, there are two other things you can add to the URL (sa=news and sa=recent) but I don’t really understand what these do yet.

Your RSS client should then ignore any previously downloaded messages and display any new messages.

Yes you are quite right, so it probably is my client. I wonder if there is something different in the xml that my client does not understand. What version of RSS are you supporting?

sa=recent
This is looking promising, maybe that has something to do with it?

Thanks for the pointers, I’ll log a help call with the RSS reader vendor.

If you try putting the URL into your browser you’ll see the XML that gets returned, including the RSS version (0.92). Maybe your client likes later versions of RSS?

Incidentally, viewing the RSS feed in a browser should work for any RSS feed, not just from this forum.

Getting closer I think. I have found out that the “sa=news” only returns the first item in a discussion, not any subsequent “re:” items.

Next up I’ll try the “sa=recent” and see what happens.

I have received this back from the people that wrote the RSS reader software I use.

[color=Blue]Hi Colin,
Some of the

[quote author=41South link=topic=5721.msg37525#msg37525 date=1097617304]
So who should I contact next?

Here you go;

http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?type=rss;sa=recent;action=.xml;limit=30

That doesn’t seem to be giving any duplicates out (at the moment). If you spot any more dupes let me know ASAP.

Its not so much duplicates but the fact that every time an entry(reply) is added to a subject (such as this one) I get all the previous messages for the subject as well.

I’ve reported this on the SMF forum, but it’s difficult for them to comment when I can’t replicate the problem. I’ve not seen any duplicate entries and I’m not actually seeing the problem you’re seeing. I’ve been watching the forum using SharpReader this evening and each new message appears as it should. I’ve just tried deleting some older messages to see if they re-appear when someone posts a new message in one of the threads.

Thanks Chris,
This thread has had a lot of replies today, and each time one is added I get the whole lot again :frowning: so it may be a good one to test against.

http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5808.msg37981#msg37981

I’m not getting that in SharpReader. I’ve deleted all the previous messages in that thread in the reader and then added a test message on the forum. SharpReader just showed the new message and didn’t re-display any of the old messages.

Is this what you’re seeing…if you remove the messages from your reader, do they re-appear when another message is added to the thread…or have I misunderstood what is happening?

Is this what you're seeing...if you remove the messages from your reader, do they re-appear when another message is added to the thread...or have I misunderstood what is happening?

You have - as they say - hit the nail on the head. I might try leaving the messages in my reader and see what happens.

SharpReader doesn’t re-display them even if I delete them, although I could imagine that this is a reader function rather than anything the feed can do.

Peter from IntraView News has been monitoring this discussion and just sent me this comment

[quote]I don

I’m not an RSS expert, so this might be wildly off-beam! My brief reading on RSS suggests that the GUID is simply a unique ID for an item. For this forum an item is an individual post in a thread.

Bearing that in mind, I’ve just grabbed a text copy of the feed and focussed on one thread titled “Re: Missing records update”. There are 5 posts (items) for this in the last 30 posts. The GUIDs for these five posts are:


    <guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38163#msg38163</guid>
    <guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38160#msg38160</guid>
    <guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38158#msg38158</guid>
    <guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38154#msg38154</guid>
    <guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38152#msg38152</guid>

These GUIDs are made up of…

  1. A fixed string relating to the forum URL, i.e. “http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=

  2. A topic ID (5815). This is the ID of the topic thread about “Missing records update”. All four records have the same topic ID and this is a fixed value assigned to the topic when the first post is made in the topic, i.e. it will never change.

  3. A message ID (for example “.msg38152#msg38152”). I don’t understand why the message number is repeated. That just seems to be the format SMF uses. However, the message number is unique to each post (38152, 38154, 38158, 38160 and 38163) and this ID is assigned to a message when it is posted to the database, i.e. it never changes.

Based on this, each time message 38152 (for example) appears in the feed, it will always have the GUID:

	<guid>http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5815.msg38152#msg38152</guid>

This format/pattern of GUIDs seems to match every other post for the same topic thread in in the feed.

So I’m not sure which part of the GUID Peter thinks is changing…unless he’s assuming that an item is the complete thread rather than the individual posts? If that were the case then as messages are added to the thread the GUID would never change, so you’d never know that a new message had been posted.

Or maybe I’m missing something important…I did say I’m not a RSS expert! If Peter would like to contact me directly ([email protected]), maybe we can work out what’s going wrong?

PS. I wonder if one area for confusion is if someone edits a message? I don’t know what happens to the GUID in this case (or what should happen). Should the message get a new GUID because it has different content, or should it keep the same GUID and then you don’t know that the text is different than you’ve seen before?

I’ll try editing this message after I post it and see what happens.

I’ve added this line when I edited the message.

Editing the message doesn’t seem to change anything in the feed and definitely not the GUID…or at least not in the examples I’ve looked at.

I’ve been monitoring this discussion and double checked what’s happening:

On this feed:
http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml;limit=30

intraVnews posts two items titled “Re: Indoor Temperature MinMax option” with identical publication dates and identical content.
However, the content of the tag is different between the items:
http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5683.10#msg38171
http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=5683.9#msg38171

So between updates, the tag was changed and because of that, intraVnews considers this a new item.

intraVnews does nothing to interpret the contents of the since this is a freeform field. Anything can be here so long as it uniquely identifies an item. If the title or description changes, the guid should stay the same.

Peter.