Add RSS feeds to Discussions

[Jackenmen]

Discussions would be far more useful for me if I could follow them outside of GitHub easily. RSS feeds provide that and they can also be used by a lot of different automations easily.

I'm thinking of something similar to Discourse so what I want to propose are:

• Feed with all discussions (what you can see by clicking on "Everything" at the left in the Discussions tab)
• Feeds with discussions of a certain type (in case of this repo, it would be a feed of discussions in "Discussions Feedback" and another one for discussions in "Mobile Feedback")
• Feeds for the individual comments in a single discussion (such as all comments in Feature Request: Resolving review comments #28)
• Feed with individual comments in all discussions (so it would be the source of the latest comments that has been posted, no matter what discussion they were posted in)

[becca]

thank you for taking the time to detail this feedback out for us. if we were to provide webhooks and more granular notification controls would this still not solve your problem?

where are you hoping to consume all of these notifications and where might be the best place for us to consider serving those notifications to you?

[tomkerkhove]

@becca I think webhooks are great but they have a different way of consuming them than RSS feeds (push vs pull).

Every morning I wake up and check my RSS feeds on what's new, while with webhooks you have to actively process them and build tech around it to handle it.

[Griatch]

@becca

where are you hoping to consume all of these notifications and where might be the best place for us to consider serving those notifications to you?

I support webhook primarily, RSS as a bonus, if possible: The main day-to-day support/community interaction for our evennia project happens through IRC/Discord. Our current google-groups mailing list (hopefully to be replaced with Discussions) today acts as the more slow-moving persistent-form support/discussion/announcements for those that can't hang around in chat. All post-events on the ML are echoed into the chat channels so everyone can keep up. We use github webhooks in the same way - reporting new commits/PRs etc into the support chat. Discussion-webhooks would thus be necessary for us to switch to Discussions and integrate them into our existing community structure, replacing our current mailing list.

... RSS feeds would be great in addition of course, but more from the perspective of the individual than of the maintainer. In lieu of webhooks, we could also poll RSS feeds and echo that to our bots, but I'd prefer a proper webhook for this. :)

[jdrch]

thank you for taking the time to detail this feedback out for us. if we were to provide webhooks and more granular notification controls would this still not solve your problem?

Not for me. I'm hoping to make GitHub Discussions my new blogging platform, since the repo it's on for me is what I blog about the most. That works best if Discussions has a simple RSS feed for all new discussion threads.

[Mikaela]

I would like to get a simple RSS feed out on my activity in discussions like there is https://github.com/Mikaela.atom and feed them into an IRC bot to have a unified view on my activity somewhere and be able to look back and see that I was contributing to discussions, while currently discussions activity can only be seen within the discussions themselves.

[alvinashcraft]

Some of the .NET teams at Microsoft are starting to use discussions as a replacement for blog posts when announcing releases. Here are two examples:

• .NET MAUI Announcements
• .NET News

Some people will probably be happy to have less noise in the RSS feed for the .NET blog, but I'll be missing those posts in my RSS reader (Newsblur). Adding RSS feeds to discussion categories would be extremely helpful to track release announcements and other news for projects.

[eeholmes]

Adding to dashboard (github.com/dashboard) would be great too. Right now the dashboard just shows issues and commits but I can't see any of the recent discussion posts.

[m-ueberall]

I'd like to point out that in case you follow large projects, the RSS feed(s) in question should contain references (and/or the full-text, if possible) to an appropriate number of last postings to enable users (and/or cronjobs that don't run every five minutes) to follow/monitor new discussion threads/postings.

This way, tools like rss2email will allow users to group or combine all/most kinds of updates specific to one or more project(s) using (locally shared) e-mail folders – and, by extension, a unified interface – without fail.

[mdoar]

Yes, please. RSS still just works.

[markcellus]

This issue has been open for a while. Can anyone from the GitHub team give any update on whether this has been prioritized with the recent Discussion features introduced or whether it is even on the roadmap? We already have RSS feeds for GitHub releases and because the infrastructure for this feature already exists, the implementation of this feature seems quite trivial.

[placoderm]

I'm also surprised that this has not been implemented.

Wondering what's holding it up. Is there a better place to raise the issue?

[sonniesedge]

Bumping this to see if there is any response from Github folk (@becca ?) . RSS feeds feel like a basic feature for any content publication system.

[sonniesedge]

oh sorry @becca you don't work for Github any more. 😂

[Pythone]

agree

[tyrosinase]

Gitlab has RSS feeds...

[magnus919]

I think if I were to put a finer point on it... any time I build a search query that gives me results I'm interested in, I'd love very much to have an RSS link to those search results. So for example I could follow all Discussions on a project where Categories match "Announcements" to stay plugged into the community updates from the project maintainers.

Or I might want to follow all issues that get labeled as "feature request".

This is such a good idea for so many reasons. Webhooks are for machines. RSS feeds are for people who want to follow interesting things.

[jordan-brough]

Another use case: One third-party framework I use has a "Releases" Category in Discussions (they don't use the "Releases" GitHub tab) and I'd like to get Slack notifications when new discussions are posted there. If I could get an RSS link that returns those results I could set up Slack to notify me based on the RSS feed.

[aborruso]

Please add the discussion RSS feed, it could be useful for automatic triggering on any web space, because RSS is a standard, and a lot of tools are able to use in input RSS to post about its update in a lot of webspace output

[jiacai2050]

Almost two years pass, still no progress on this? @github-staff

[sonniesedge]

RSS feeds aren't compatible with walled gardens...

[Pythone]

We need to work on an open source alternative to discussions then.

[lersi]

GitHub is shit, use gitlab instead

[tyrosinase]

Not terribly useful when the projects you want to follow are on GitHub and you have no control over it.

I mean: why didn't you post your response on Gitlab?

[hmans]

Webhooks for Discussions appear to be in beta at the moment. They will at lease enable someone to build a service that

• receives these webhooks
• mirrors the data (if this isn't against GitHub's TOS?)
• serves RSS feeds containing the data.

The feeds wouldn't be advertised from here, but at least it's a way to make them available.

All in all I'd prefer if GitHub just added their own feeds though.

[jdrch]

Some progress is better than none :)

[markcellus]

Hey everyone, I've made RSS feeds for Github Discussions available on Open RSS, a non-profit project I developed to provide RSS feeds for websites that don't have them.

You can get a Discussion RSS feed by navigating to any discussions dashboard page and typing in openrss.org/ right before the github.com part in the browser URL bar. e.g. https://openrss.org/github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/discussions. Works the same for issues and pull requests as well. Here's a guide on how to use them.

[aborruso]

For example, the RSS feed for the discussions at https://github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/discussions are located at https://openrss.org/github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/discussions

This is really great, thank you @markcellus

Where do I find the list of all websites supported?

[czottmann]

@markcellus As someone who made some decent pocket money in the '00s by building RSS feeds for sites and people that didn't have them — thanks for doing that. Keep up the good work, RSS is still very much needed, and you're a legend for fighting the good fight here. 🖖🏼

[tabacitu]

@markcellus how often does OpenRSS refresh a Discussion feed?

I have a Github repo that's had new discussions in the past 4 days, but they don't show up in the RSS feed at all - https://openrss.org/github.com/Laravel-Backpack/community-forum/issues

[amarouane-ABDELHAK]

@markcellus the discussion feed does not update once generated. The github RSS feed fir the discussion is kind of useless since it doesn't target one discussion and get the comments :sad_face:

[magnus919]

Please don't hijack this issue to talk about another product. Thanks.

[dpolivaev]

What do you mean by "another product"? openrss?
They have provided at least a workaround. If the feature request becomes implemented directly at GitHub, the workaround would not be needed. But for the moment it should be praised here as the only available solution.

[tyrosinase]

Mentioning it is a good thing, but talking about its features etc. keeps notifying people who are following this in probably-vain hope for a native fix.

(Now, if we were following via RSS it wouldn't be so bad, but instead we get new-mail pings...)

[jayceeday]

Hey everyone! Jaycee here, Designer on Discussions at GitHub.

Admittedly, this took us a while to get around to, but we did it.

RSS feeds are now available for Discussions 🎉

Here you go:

https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/discussions.atom
ex. https://github.com/community/community/discussions.atom

https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/discussions/categories/CATEGORY.atom
ex. https://github.com/community/community/discussions/categories/announcements.atom

[LindseyB]

This is a bug. I've reported.

[LindseyB]

This is fixed now. Thanks again for the report.

[cwalther]

Confirmed, the feeds work again. Thanks!

[edu18RR]

La propuesta es implementar una función de "Búsqueda y Filtrado Avanzado" en la sección de discusiones de GitHub. Esta función permitiría a los usuarios buscar y filtrar discusiones de manera personalizada según sus intereses y preferencias.

Beneficios clave:

1. Acceso rápido a discusiones relevantes: Los usuarios podrán utilizar palabras clave y filtros específicos para encontrar rápidamente las discusiones que se ajusten a sus intereses. Esto les ahorrará tiempo y esfuerzo al evitar la necesidad de revisar manualmente cada repositorio.

2. Mantenerse al día con temas de interés: La búsqueda y el filtrado avanzado permitirán a los usuarios mantenerse actualizados con los temas que les interesan sin perderse información importante en medio de múltiples discusiones.

3. Mejor experiencia de usuario: Al facilitar la búsqueda de discusiones, GitHub mejorará la experiencia del usuario, lo que podría aumentar la participación y la colaboración dentro de la comunidad.

Características propuestas:

1. Búsqueda por palabras clave: Los usuarios podrán ingresar palabras clave relacionadas con el tema que están buscando, y el sistema mostrará las discusiones relevantes.

2. Filtros personalizados: Los usuarios podrán aplicar filtros según la fecha de publicación, etiquetas, estado de la discusión (abierto/cerrado), entre otros.

3. Guardar búsquedas: Los usuarios tendrán la opción de guardar búsquedas frecuentes para acceder rápidamente a las discusiones relevantes en el futuro.

4. Notificaciones de búsqueda: Los usuarios pueden optar por recibir notificaciones cuando se publiquen nuevas discusiones que coincidan con sus búsquedas guardadas.

5. Búsquedas populares: Proporcionar una lista de búsquedas populares y tendencias en la comunidad para ayudar a los usuarios a descubrir nuevos temas de interés.

Al implementar una función de "Búsqueda y Filtrado Avanzado" en las discusiones de GitHub, se facilitará el acceso a la información relevante y se enriquecerá la experiencia de los usuarios en la plataforma. Esto promoverá una mayor participación y colaboración dentro de la comunidad, asegurando que los usuarios se mantengan actualizados con los temas que más les interesan.

[bogorad]

How about this as a single feed? Or better yet, any filter as a feed!

https://github.com/notifications?query=reason%3Aparticipating

[tyrosinase]

A good first step, but a quick submission of https://github.com/community/community/ to my RSS reader says it can't auto-detect the feed. I can manually put it in, but discoverability is important.

Until then, what's the URL for the version with comments?

[LindseyB]

There is no URL version for the comments at the comment right now you can use https://github.com/community/community/discussions.atom, but would have to follow the links to get to the comments.

[markcellus]

[Pythone]

Hey, I appreciate everyone here and your overall support for Github feeds provided by Open RSS! heart But like others have said, we should probably keep non-Github related discussion out of this thread. I'm happy to discuss any questions, concerns or feedback related to Open RSS feeds by just emailing me at mark[at]openrss[dot]org.

GH discussions is a part of GH. This is not just about the feeds, this is about if they are properly implemented.