RSS Polling

:discourse2: Summary Discourse RSS Polling enables support for importing embedded content from multiple RSS/ATOM feeds
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-rss-polling
:open_book: Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse

Enabling RSS Polling

The RSS Polling plugin can be enabled either by the toggle or from its settings, both accessible from your admin/plugins page:

:discourse2: Hosted by us? Please contact our support team if you would like this plugin enabled. :email:

Configuration

The rss polling frequency site setting controls the frequency that the RSS feed is polled. The default value is to poll the feed once every 30 minutes. The setting has a minimum allowed value of 10 minutes.

Once the plugin is enabled, go to your Admin / Plugins page. Click the RSS Polling entry from the plugin’s page sidebar to add your feed URLs. Select a user from your Discourse site for the feed’s Author field. That user will become the owner of all posts published from the feed. Use the Discourse Category setting to configure which category the feed’s posts will be published to:

:warning: Note that if you have previously configured the RSS Polling plugin by setting the categories to publish to on your site’s Embedding page, those category settings will continue to work. The new method of configuring the feed categories directly on the RSS Polling page is a far more straightforward approach. Let us know if you have questions about this change.

Changing RSS Polling Settings

Each unique RSS Feed URL will only be imported into Discourse once, and Discourse will import the entire RSS Feed at the time the RSS Polling settings for that feed are configured. Deleting and Re-adding the same Feed URL will have no impact on this functionality. Also note that an RSS Feed topic that has been deleted will not be re-imported into Discourse after it has been deleted.

You can change the author of all topics associated with a specific RSS Feed URL by changing the “Author” of the corresponding Feed URL on the RSS Polling settings page. This will cause Discourse to automatically update all topics from that RSS feed with the new author, and this will show as a system post edit event when viewed in the “Admin → Logs” page:

Changing the category of an RSS Feed URL will not automatically change the category of the corresponding topics. To change the category of topics associated with an RSS Feed you will need to manually move the topics to a new category using Administrative Bulk Operations . You will need to change the category of the RSS Feed URL on the RSS Polling settings page as well, so that all new topics being imported will go to the new category.

Changing the tags of an RSS Feed URL will also not automatically change the tag of the corresponding topics. RSS Topic tags will need to be manually changed, using Administrative Bulk Operations, similar to categories, as the tags are only applied to topics when they are first imported into Discourse.

Prevent embedded topics from being unlisted

By default, all embedded topics that are created on Discourse sites are unlisted until they receive a reply. This behavior makes sense when topics are pulled into Discourse with the javascript embed code, but it doesn’t make sense for topics that are pulled in via the RSS plugin. To prevent RSS topics from being unlisted, disable the embed unlisted site setting.

Configure the optional Feed Category Filter

The optional Feed Category Filter setting for each entry allow you to limit which feed items get published to Discourse based on the item’s category. When a category is entered into this setting, only feed items matching this category will be published to Discourse. Taking the feed at https://blog.discourse.org/feed.xml as an example, if you load that feed directly in your browser you will see that each entry has a category filter associated with it. The value of that category’s term property is what you would enter into the Feed Category Filter setting if you wished to only publish feed items for a specific category. For example:

Showing the full post content

If the embed truncate site setting is enabled on your site (it is enabled by default), feed topics will only display an excerpt of the feed post. Users can view the full post by clicking the “Show Full Post” button that is displayed below the excerpt. Discourse will then scrape the topic’s embed URL to get the full post content. If the full post content is not being correctly retrieved, you can fix the issue by configuring the embed whitelist selector site setting. See Configure the Allowed Embed Selectors Setting for details about that setting.

Settings

Name Description
rss polling enabled Enable importing embed posts from multiple RSS feeds
rss polling frequency Feed polling frequency, in minutes

:discourse2: Hosted by us? This plugin is available on all of our hosted plans. Please contact our support team if you would like to activate these features. :email:

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