I recently put up a SMF instance that requires a login to see anything; totally private everything.
I see all of the RSS icons in Firefox/Safari and when clicking on them, Firefox will show me a preview of the feed. I see recent posts and content. It looks fine.
When I try to subscribe in a RSS reader, it no posts show up, like the feed is empty. I have tried Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, and even Thunderbird.
Is this because the forum is private?
I thought Thunderbird supports authenticated RSS feeds, but I didn't receive a prompt.
What am I doing wrong?
I've tried change the rss type (rss2, atom) in the url without success. I'm not sure what else to do.
If your forum is private RSS feeds will not work. Even though thunderbird may support authentication, it is not the type that will work with your board. If you visit your board as a guest, and try and view the feed, you will see what every bot, reader, or application will see... nothing. If you visit your board as an admin or member that can see posts/topics, then you will see items in the feeds.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I guess if I want RSS feeds, I need to allow guests to view posts.
Do you know of any type of forum that allows private RSS feeds either via password or unique token/key (I'm not sure if that even makes sense)?
It makes sense, but I don't know of any that allow it.
Ok. I'll use the google.
Thanks again for the timely help.