How to get an RSS feed of new members who have signed up to the Community?

[EmilyBilling]

Hi, 

We are trying to build an RSS which a variety of content so we have a news view of all types of activity going on in the community including when a new member registers for Community. How can we get an RSS feed to show new members who have registered? 

Thanks

Em

[ClaudiusH]

Hi @EmilyBilling

Each Lithium community comes with a variety of built in RSS feeds which are all content focused though. (One way to discover them is e.g. via the Chrome extension "Slick RSS: Feed Finder"😞

RSS feeds from the Lithium Community

I think it should be relatively easy to create a custom endpoint to return an RSS feed of newly registered users. The more interesting question for me is understanding what you are trying to achieve with it? If I understand you correctly you are trying to combine multiple feeds into an activity stream, correct? Would that be shown on the community as well?

Also keep in mind that if you want to show a personalized activity feed for a users there's the "activity feed" component which lists posting and kudo activity, e.g. here on the SKype Community: https://community.skype.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/10256946

[EmilyBilling]

Spot on @ClaudiusH, we are trying to create our own custom news feed showing all types of activity happening on the Community. Similar to the old Facebook news feed (i.e. time based) or Lithium's competitor Jive's native Community news feed. We want to show a variety of content including:

• New posts/topics
• any replies/conversations
• new members who have registered for community
• content which has been liked 

The idea is all activity is combined into one time based feed, however not customized at a personal level. We're building this for internal visibility and Community Manager visibility, which I currently struggle with! Once we know this is working, we may then provide it at a community level for members to see. 

I've been doing some more research, and I'm not sure RSS feeds will pull through all the pieces we want (i.e. we also want to pull through content from private boards, and show avatars next to each piece of content), so next week I'm going to try building this with various API calls.

Thanks for your suggestions and help! Once we have this up and running (hopefully) I'd be happy to share a screenshot of what we created. 

Cheers

Em

[ClaudiusH]

Hi @EmilyBilling

Any progress on your update feed investigation?

Unless you know that your audience is already now using RSS readers to follow the conversation it might not be the most modern technology and experience to invest in. Have a look at the "Live Feed" experience that the Google Adwords community built (Click the "Live Feed" in the middle of the page here): https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-AdWords/ct-p/Google_AdWords

The motivation behind implementing it for Google was create more of a familiar live feed experience from other social websites.

It is also discussed in the below webinar recording from @VarunGrazitti and @yurikleban here:

[EmilyBilling]

Thanks @ClaudiusH

The Google feed is very similar to what we want to achieve, and thanks for sending through the Webinar, I'm going to watch it now! We're hoping to have the first newsfeed up this week (pulling through new posts and comments plus basic UI).

At the moment we're focusing on using it internally, but I'd like to eventually have it available for our customers too. My team has built it using Lithium APIs, and for the next iteration we want to:

- Conversations from private groups

- Show when a new member has signed up

- Have a quicker refresh of the page

- Design 

Here's a screenshot of our first iteration. 

[ClaudiusH]

Thanks for sharing your WIP. I'm looking forward to the public launch and learn what impact it has on your community engagement.

The "Show new registrations" item is interesting: What are you hoping for from exposing this? Existing members welcoming the new ones? Or is it more about showing liveliness and the inflow of possible new conversation members?

[sarat]

Hi Emilly,

I understand you looking to display collaborative RSS feed at one spot , will that be categorized or will it be one list? I can help you out by adding some custom codes in it. Let me know if you are still stuck with it?

[EmilyBilling]

Exactly, displaying new registrations is to show liveliness and assist engagement. The industry we are in is also quite close, where people know each other in a business or personal context, and this will help our members see when others they know are signing up, and hopefully help them to engage.  

[EmilyBilling]

@saratthanks for your offer. We decided to build the feed with API calls, and so far so good. Will let you know if we have trouble!

[sarat]

Thanks for response . Just let me know if I can help you anyways.

Regards,
Sarat

[sarat]

Sure,

I will be available to help you anytime. 

Regards,
Sarat

[schwarzd]

Hi @ClaudiusH

Thanks for your info about the various built-in RSS feeds.

Only the link to the mentioned Chrome extension isn't working.

There you are: Slick RSS 

oups, here is the right extension: Slick RSS Feed Finder

[ClaudiusH]

You actually need both extensions: The "Slick RSS Feed Finder" lists you all the feeds linked form a page and "Slick RSS" is the actual reader that formats the RSS' XML nicely readable.

[schwarzd]

Thanks @ClaudiusH for your clarification.