User CP RSS

Here's a suggestion: generate an RSS feed for the topics listed in the User CP. That way users can get their subscribed topics from a reader or similar software (such as Google's personalized homepage).

That's a lot of cycles right there to update the RSS for each user ... good idea though

Not really, you'd dynamically generate it on request, perhaps at a push you could just use a different skin with the RSS template in it and generate the smaller bits.

That's what I thought. Querying the DB and generating an xml file shouldn't take more cycles than querying the DB and generating the PHP for the usercp. Do it on-demand, and it's really no different than browsing to the CP and seeing it there (in fact, you can probably just replace that altogether with RSS... put the RSS feed right into the CP as well).

Except you have to log in to see your usercp. How would you get
round that with an aggregator?

Not sure. However, LiveJournal has RSS for each user that are dynamically generated and their authentication carries over to them as well. When you are logged in (browsing their site or not, just as long as you have their login cookie), any feeds that you read have the proper security levels implemented. If a LiveJournal friend has a friends-only post and you're not logged in, the RSS feed that you request won't have that post.

If you go to http://sbressi.livejournal.com/data/rss and look at my RSS feed, you won't see some friends-only entries. If you had the LJ cookie, you would. I'd imagine it would be similar in some way to that.

Whatever PHP file creates the feed would check for the cookie that exists from the forum software.

If it was something you really needed you could query your CP say every 15 mins to see if there's anything new (actually make that 14 mins, because of the logout time interval), and create your own XML feed from that, using curl, wget or LWP ...

IP logging, perhaps?

<edit="more detail">

As in when they request the script, check if their IP matches the one last used to log in properly.

</edit>

That wouldn't work so well for dial-up folks.

Is there any problem with not having to log in for the RSS feed? Say have some variable like 'user=cybersaga' in the url. All people could see are the threads you've suscribed to. Big deal. Then when you actually go to the page, it will work as normal and make you log in.

That's true, it's no worse than me going to your profile and looking at what threads you've posted in...