Then you’re probably going to need to use the API. Per-category posts out of context aren’t provided in a feed in this way.
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I don’t understand why you can have a feed of filtered by user (/u/:username/activity.rss) but not one filtered by category 
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I’ll be another vote for this feature. I belong to a food discussion site http://foodtalkcentral.com/ which has 40 or so channels for discussion, most of which are region based. Living in Los Angeles I don’t have much need to see all of the posts for say the NYC channel or the Tahoe-Truckee-Reno channel but I would like to see all of the posts for the Los Angeles channel. Since there’s a lot of discussion within topics, seeing the topics is not enough. Also, setting the RSS feed for the whole board is starting to overwhelm me with posts I have no interest in seeing.
Please, enable this feature. It seems possible since, as a previous poster noted, you can have a feed filterd by user. It would be a great help. Thanks
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Why not open the category-specific page for LA
If you’re logged in discourse already tracks your read state and progress within a topic.
A feed for latest replies across a category without any context would be really really confusing.
Because I prefer to read the posts in an RSS Reader rather than on the web where I have to click around to get to content. I prefer it so much so I’m using the feed for all of the board posts rather than the site even though I have to slog through a couple of hundered posts in a week. The previous site I belonged to Chowhound.com did have this feature and it made reading posts so easy.
This is usually not the case. since it is obvious what the poster is talking about. Plus topics tend to generate a lot of activity in a short period of time. In the rare instance I need context, I click through to the topic on the site.
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I would like to see that happen as well.
I’m active on some discourse instances and merge the discussion in a central RSS reader. Increasing the flexibility/functionality of RSS feeds would be highly appreciated.
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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).
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If custom code that works on all Discourse forums in the bot is an option, you can instead poll /posts.json; each item includes a category_id that you can filter on.
As said above, adding a posts.rss to each category is possible but hasn’t happened yet.
It would certainly round out the RSS feeds on offer nicely.
I haven’t got a use for it personally right now, but I can see it being helpful in a few different circumstances.
At the moment, the same thing can be achieved with a 3rd party integration service pretty easily (i.e. make.com, zapier.com, etc) but it is a bit messy.
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