i totally grok why RSS is not available yet... with the nature of real-time discussions, it could get scary on the db side.  But I think you could deploy rss safely if a group is private.... which typically would not have mass amounts of posts and requests.  I think that might make people happy until the full RSS feature can be deployed safely.  Something to think about, maybe.  Oh yeah, there are also some measures that can be taken to turn a feed OFF if it reaches a certain level of activity... sort of like flood protection.  So there are ways to provide RSS while still avoiding problems that might occur.

I agree RSS would be great... It would be a good way to help promote the forum on my blog.  You could use it as a widget for wordpress.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting. RSS is high on the list. Not sure it will be in the next version though.

One of my concerns with RSS on private groups is handling the security. To my knowledge RSS doesn't handle authentication.

maybe we can just have an option to enable RSS for groups where people aren't to fussed about absolute security. Then we could just use a big fat private hash to identify the RSS feed for the private group.

I think RSS supports HTTP auth (since it's basically an http stream anyway... most, but not all rss readers supports this)

ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2617.txt

doesn't look like google reader supports HTTP auth yet, bugger.

Add my vote for RSS.

Sull: "it could get scary on the db side"

Why? This is AJAX, why not just change the structure of the XML that the posts are stored in and that are sent to the browser tothe default RSS structure? Then you can use the same RSS feed to load both the posts in here and in your RSS client.

It might require some extra work, but it's possible.