What is RSS and how do I add it?

[wickland]

I have been reading a little about RSS lately and I believe it's a tool that can help generate traffic to my site, correct? Please explain what RSS is.

Also while we are on the topic, is there an add-on mod or hack so the RSS feed can be placed on my forum?

Thanks
Best Regards

[towermatt]

RSS is a live feed source from the internet. It can basically be whatever is out there. News, forums, entertainment...all kinds of stuff.

vBulletin 3.6.x and up has built in RSS functionality and you should have a group in your admin CP that houses it. You basically create a forum, find a feed on the net and put in the URL under the settings.

So no modification needed unless you wanted to do a block for CMPS or something.

You can see an example of mine here

That is the center column for the CMPS mod (wonderful) so that I could show them on a separate site page from the forum. How you want to do it is totally up to you.

[wickland]

Thanks for letting me know where to activate the RSS, that was very handy and simple to do. I kept thinking I had to create all this myself lol.

So does this mean that my forum articles will end up in someone else's website who has RSS? Where do I find a feed and what are the benefits this can do for my site? I can see that orange little RSS square in the address bar in this forum that goes to a list of forum topics, is this different than a feed?

How has this benefited your forums?
Another concern, would this be considered duplicate content having this on your site? Have you noticed any Google penalties?

[towermatt]

There is a modification around here to put the little orange icon on your site. Basically all it does is make it so it will "feed". Meaning, if you set it up from here (for instance) it would auto update when threads are bumped.

If you wanted to make your site available as an RSS feed you could, but it would be up to others to actually put it on their site

An RSS from this site would simply be the forums but they would be "current" if that makes sense.

As far as my site, I use the RSS just for news/entertainment/happening today...that kind of stuff. I am not sure if it draws anyone but the members seem to love to have an easy source to get this stuff from on the site.

[wickland]

Do you know what the URL of my feed is so I could add some of those "add to google" buttons etc?

Thanks
Best Regards

[towermatt]

I believe it would simply be the URL to your forums. Not sure about the "add to google" button because I have not tried this myself.

A good test would be to set a feed with your forum URL, run it an then see if it created the threads for it. Watch out though, it could be a lot.

Not sure if forums are just feeds by nature or not

[Kirk Y]

You can access your forum's RSS/XML Feed at 'external.php'.