There's a mod available for Yabb (the forum software used here) which enables an RSS feed to be set up. It is a possible option that these forums could benefit from.

What's an RSS feed?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This is a simple browser environment whereby you can pull a newsfeed consisting of just subject lines for every new topic posted on a BBS. It's an incredibly powerful environment, and instead of people having to navigate thru forum and message lists to read each message they can see at a glance new messages, and then just click on the message to go to the web site.

Dead simple to use, and for people on a time or cost budget it makes life a lot simpler because you can see at a glance what's going on on the BBS/forums.

What's required on the server?
The RSS feed update, available from:

http://www.mineralarts.com/cgi/yabbsp1/YaBB.pl?board=mods;action=display;num=108...

What's required on the user PC?
Installation of a simple piece of software known as an RSS reader. The one I use is FeedDemon from Bradsoft:

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp

There are other readers available.

Note that the client software on the users PC is totally independent of these forums - you could install and use it for other forums and newsfeeds without askthetrades deciding to use RSS.

Why bother? I'm happy with the forums as they are!
Productivity is the main enhancement. You don't have to navigate thru all the forums to get to see where the new messages are - you can just launch the RSS reader and it will go ferret out the new messages and show them in a concise list. Then you can click on the ones that are of specific interest to you - and use the forums exactly as you already do.

But it doesn't end there. If you happen to want to review online news (for example from the BBC News web site), or product announcements from your favourite suppliers (if they've got RSS enabled), you can set up a personal group, and when you launch the reader it will go ferret all the feeds you've told it to look at. Then in a single browser window you can click between the different web sites and messages without having to enter URL's etc.

Trust me, RSS is brilliant and well worth a look at. Never mind upgrading these forums to enable RSS - just download and install an RSS reader and try it out on other RSS-enabled web sites.

RSS has been evolving in the Internet community for the last couple of years and is now quite widespread.

Andrew

[quote author=plugwash  link=1099681722/0#1 date=1099683513]handymac are you familiar with ssh the linux console and sftp or scp? [/quote]

Fortunately, no.

Andrew