Sorry to bump this thread, but I also think this would be a rather useful feature, and AFAICS it’s still not available. (Aside from the posters in this thread, see also this other, more recent thread also requesting the feature)
An example use case is a community IRC channel with a bot that watches some relevant RSS feeds, announcing the latest posts. This cannot be done when the relevant feed is a category in a wider forum (consider e.g. the OpenCL category in the Khronos forum, or the CUDA category in the NVIDIA forum):
- if the bot follows the category feed, it can only get a list of topics: it can announce when a new topic is created, but not when a new comment (post) is added to an existing topic, severely limiting the usefulness of the bot;
- if the bot follows the forum-wide
latest.rss, it will get posts from all topics, including those from irrelevant categories, and would need to do additional filtering, with the risk of losing updates on relevant posts in a low-activity category of an otherwise high-volume forum (except maybe by polling at high frequency, which is not nice).
A category feed focused on the latest posts in that category would solve this. This could either be a “latest posts in this categry”, or even just a “latest post from each topic in this category. The absence of either of these feeds is particularly frustrating because you can almost get there by getting the category’s JSON, which however is missing some of the elements that are in the RSS feed, such as the post content, for preview (aside, obviously, from requiring completely different processing code client-side).