I use RSS, no modification needed and it updates once an hour. I guess I don't see the need for immediate updates, remember the days we'd make a post and it would sit for a while before it got a reply?
I thought RSS updated right away? Oh well, we have that enabled too, along with Twitter and Facebook notifications. There is no way we're going to get SoccerMom to install and understand how to use an RSS reader. But she takes to FB or Twitter fairly easily.
Personally, I was happy with the email subscriptions for forums in 3.x, but it hasn't been released for vb4, so I had to modernize.
I thought RSS updated right away? Oh well, we have that enabled too, along with Twitter and Facebook notifications. There is no way we're going to get SoccerMom to install and understand how to use an RSS reader. But she takes to FB or Twitter fairly easily.
Personally, I was happy with the email subscriptions for forums in 3.x, but it hasn't been released for vb4, so I had to modernize.
I should have been more clear, I actually use http://twitterfeed.com/ which you can give your forum RSS url to and it will automatically post it to your twitter account. I just took a peak and it looks like it will update every half hour actually.
RSS can be crafted so that it only posts new threads (i.e., only the first post in a thread). And you probably have to because otherwise you'll exceed the twitterfeed limit.
Have you checked out YAFB?
In case you want to code it yourself, you can use the Facebook Connect API publish_stream() method with a targetid (which is your fan page id) and that will do the trick