Tag: external-data

March 6, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

A great many vBulletin forum owners appear to be unaware that their forums can provide an RSS feed “out of the box”.

This is a great shame because it limits the forums ability to grow and have visibility.

Now the naysayers will say one of two things

  1. I don’t want people stealing my content
  2. I want people to visit the forum and if they use feeds they might not (usually because of ad revenue)

The reality is that there are a great many forums out there all competing for the same users and you need to use every competitive advantage there is. In vBulletin it’s things like allowing users to subscribe to daily digests of posts to a forum. Pretty much the same thing result as an RSS feed but it’s turned on by default and forum owners don’t proactively turn it off.