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  1.  

    Can we get comment feeds here, please?

    (Take a look at the FeedThis plugin if you think that this is a good idea.)

  2.  
    As far as I can tell, Andrew, we've had FeedThis installed on meta ever since we started it, and RSS feeds seem to be available throughout. Are you not seeing them?
  3.  

    I'd like the feed for all comments rather than all discussions (have a look at the n-forum to see what I mean). This is available via FeedThis but maybe you have to select it, I don't remember and it's too late for me to dig it out tonight. At the moment, I just see the link to "All Discussions" feed in the column on the left-hand side.

  4.  

    I just tried what the URL should be for the "All Comments" feed. It sort of worked. However, there's no link for that on any page that I can see (maybe I'm just being dumb) - I hacked it together from the URL for the same feed on the n-Forum. You need to modify the theme templates if you want people to actually be able to use these feeds.

    Seeing the feed reminds me of a minor modification that we made over on the n-Forum. My feed reader only displays the last entry with a given title; so if there are several comments on the same discussion then I only see the last. I think that some other feed readers do the same. This isn't a problem for me as I always click through to here - I use the feed to tell me that there's something to read here - but I know that others actually read the discussions in their readers.

    What we did was to append the comment number to the title, thus making it unique. The full hack also added the person's name to the title so that in the feed reader it looks like:

    Andrew Stacey comments on "RSS here" (134)

    The relevant line is 181. The new version reads:

    $Properties["Title"] = FormatHtmlStringInline (ForceString($Comment->AuthUsername . " comments on \"" . $Comment->Discussion . "\" (" . $Comment->CommentID . ")", "" ));
    

    (Let me repeat: I can easily live without this if you don't want to do too much hackery here)

  5.  
    Sorry, Andrew --- line 181 of which file? I'm sleepy tonight, but I'll do this at some point.
  6.  

    Whoops!

    extensions/FeedThis/library/Function.FeedThis.php
    
  7.  
    Done. Please report bugs or success!
  8.  

    That seems to be working just fine! Thanks!

    Incidentally, I know that your primary interest and focus is the main mathoverflow site, but as we found on the n-lab then the supporting sites are useful too. I've done a fair bit of hacking on the n-forum to make it useful for the n-lab gang so if you see anything over there that you like, just ask and I'll try to remember how I did it!

  9.  

    I'm getting the comments in a strange order. They should be ordered by comment but I think the default is to order them by discussion. Looking at my files, I see that line 121 reads:

    $s->AddOrderBy('DateCreated', 'c', $SortDirection = 'desc');
    

    (in the original, the second argument is a 'd' for discussion).

  10.  

    done