I have received emails from a few people advising that they would like to read posts and interact with Cisco via RSS, but they cannot for whatever reasons.
The forum administrator has advised me that there is a known issue with RSS feeds on private forums such as this one.
Cisco should consider that it is important for Cisco to provide information in a manner most convenient for the recipient. This increases participation.
Most if not all RSS readers have a username/password authentication capability.
Additionally, for some inexplicable reason, Cisco currently truncates posts on open forums to the first few sentences. This makes using RSS as a means of participation almost useless. Nobody is going to read the first sentence of a post in RSS then open every item in IE to finish the post/article.
In addition to the above, the Jive middleware or whatever you are using between Community Server and RSS frequently produces 404 and other errors.
Every time I e-mail to complain it seems to get fixed for a while.
I suggest the following fixes, in order of importance;
1. Stop truncating the RSS items - make the full post/article/document available via RSS
2. Do whatever is necessary to improve the reliability of the RSS feed (perhaps use a Thuinderbolt device to monitor it)
3. See if you can make prrivate forums available via RSS with username/password authentication
Thank you.
