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I subscribe to the RSS feed for OR-Exchange (in Thunderbird). Apparently it only shows new questions, not new responses/comments, so I can't tell from T-bird when something has been added to an existing question. Anyone know a polynomial-time workaround?

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9 Answers

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Near as I can tell, the question feed is the only one currently available. See http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3262/provide-more-rss-feeds-questions-activity-unanswered-users-badges-searches for some discussion on this. I agree it would be great to get the answers too!

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Hi,

I think you might be able to build a Yahoo Pipe for this website and feed the pipe to your Thunderbird.

People on Stack Overflow have been very creative with Pipes. The following pipes might help:

A search for StackO on Yahoo Pipes

Please also take a look at this old post

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1 
 Thanks -- I didn't know about Yahoo Pipes, so this was quite interesting. If I scrape the front page, I can find dates for recent activity, but (without having studied too deeply) I didn't find a way in Pipes to keep a running tab of which dates I'd already checked (so that I would get a feed for a new response/comment only once). Maybe I'll research further some day, but for now I'll probably just scan the main page periodically. – Paul Rubin Dec 15 at 0:53
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Pipes are pretty neat. Over time, http://pipes.yahoo.com/mike_trick/orexchange may have the full feed. But it is not particularly automatic at the moment (nor complete: it only includes recently active questions).

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What is the RSS feed for the site? I couldn't find it from the FAQ.

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The question feed is or-exchange.com/feeds . The answer feed is the subject of this question. – Michael Trick♦ Jan 6 at 11:57
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Paul is asking for a polynomial-time workaround for better RSS feeds. I don't see any, but was aiming for a heuristic that runs in O(k) :-) I was thinking adding the say 20 highest ranking users with their user feeds i.e /feeds/user/ as suggested in link by Dr. Trick, but it does not work, the feed is empty. Is this feature activated ? Other things that could be improved is new comments in a thread should reactivate the thread and as with a new answer. Comments should not be wrapped, it seems there is a maximum number of comments allowed, then it will fold the rest.

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 Paul is too old to deal with polynomial time; Paul is looking for an O(1) solution. ;-) – Paul Rubin Jul 22 at 13:49
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There is a link down the bottom of each question to "question feed" that is a RSS feed just for responses to that question. You'll need to subscribe individually to questions you are interested in though...

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Yes but still you have to add each question, which is too much work. I was thinking : # User activity feed: /feeds/user/<ID> for the most active users, then you would get the most changes. It would of course be a hack. – Bo Jensen Jul 22 at 10:42
I'm not sure the answer feeds would pick up comments, either. (The question feeds do not seem to pick up comments to the questions.) I guess there's no alternative to regular visits to the site. <sigh>The sacrifices we make.</sigh> – Paul Rubin Jul 22 at 13:52
You're both right, of course. And the comments issue is a real one, since its not immediately obvious that comments have been made unless you actually visit the page - I don't think the question is updated on the homepage...? – David Woods Jul 22 at 15:25
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If someone has the time, it might be worth playing around with Pipes, as Mark suggested, or even a custom script to scrape the site... we don't have that many questions, it should even be possible to (automatically) check the master list of questions, visit each of the pages, scrape all the responses and comments and update a database with the changes. After that creating an RSS feed would be relatively easy. Of course, if we could get direct access (even read access) to the database behind the site it would be even simpler.

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Hello.

I think it would be better if the format of the "title" element on the user's RSS feed changed from:

"Answer by $name for $question"

to:

"Answer for $question by $name"

The reason is that the current naming scheme breaks the "Sort on subject" function on most RSS readers as it performs grouping based on "$name" rather than on "$question".

Let me elaborate: Suppose we are subscribed to two feeds (User1 and User2) and two questions (Question1 and Question2) answered by these users. Now, if both feeds end up in the same article pool in our RSS reader (that is, an "or-exchange" folder), then - with the current scheme - by clicking on "Sort by subject" function we end up with:

Answer by User1 for Question1

Answer by User1 for Question2

Answer by User2 for Question1

Answer by User2 for Question2

while the intuitively expected result should be:

Answer by User1 for Question1

Answer by User2 for Question1

Answer by User1 for Question2

Answer by User2 for Question2

as the term "subject" refers to the "Question" asked and not on the "User".

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HEY, it actually works, you should add /feeds/user/ (i.e no id) then feeds for each answer any user write. No feeds for coments still though.

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There just seems to be a time delay for some reason. – Bo Jensen Jul 22 at 15:56
I get a 404 (not found) error when I try to link to or-exchange.com/feeds/user without adding a specific ID at the end. (With an ID it works.) – Paul Rubin Jul 23 at 15:06

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