Trying to understand, better, how our forum works, I'm mystified by the postings of "Mr.RSS." I PM'd a couple folks, but my timing may be bad - I understand that most are busy right after the Holidays. Thought I'd ask the general population of posters who've been around longer than I have - What is a "TrainBoard news robot?" Who or what is "Mr.RSS" and why can't we Quick Reply to him/it? What is the commercial connection - Mr.RSS' postings seem to be mostly selling stuff. I thought 'classifieds' were restricted to a different area of TB. Just curious - it's easier to promote TB if I understand how it works. Thanks! Scott
Mr. RSS (read here for an excellent explanation) is not a person, and not really a robot, but a way of bringing content into the forum system, or it could be a web page, or personal desktop aggregator. Content can be extracted from external web sites (such as Union Pacific, or Canadian National where they offer news through an RSS feed) or from within this site. In other words; information that is frequently updated can be formatted into a standard way that allows it to be read and extracted, then automatically reformatted to suit any number of needs. We use RSS feeds within the site to bring blog postings, TrainStore listings, and RailSeek submissions into the active topics list. A person could post a TrainStore ad, or make a blog post, and it might go unnoticed. But, with the RSS feed, it is posted automatically to a forum (TrainBoard Extra) where it will show up on TrainBoard Live, 24 Hours of TrainBoard, and New Posts. Note also that we not only use, but also offer several RSS feeds. Does this help? Charlie
Yes, Charlie - thank you. Some of it is a little over my head, but I understand how the robot is used, so your explanation gives me some new aspects of TB to study. Thanks for your time! Scott
