Private Forums and Feeds / "Latest Post"
 

We have a forum which is set up to only allow access to users with an account. We also have a website which authenticates against forum accounts using vbulletins own code.

What we want to do is have a "latest post" box on our website which shows the latest posts from the forums.

As far as I can see, this isn't directly possible using the external data provider (rss/js/xml feeds) as it doesn't support authentication via any method.

Does anyone know of an alternative way we could achieve this?

If your website shares the same server as your forums, you could just do a query to get the latest posts. Or, copy and modify the external.php page to not disallow those forums (and do something to stop members from using that file as an rss feed).

Through some further delving into the code and random experimentation, I found that if you comment out the following line:
...then the feed appears to work as expected for logged in users, while returning a blank page (as expected) when not logged in.

Has anyone else used this method? Have you found any behaviour that I should be aware of?