You Can Filter the Forum’s RSS Feed by karmaThreshold (and a few other useful filters)

I am posting this because I could not find this documented anywhere, and it’s going to be a huge improvement to my reader inbox. Hopefully someone else will find it useful. By default, the RSS feed is filtered to karmaThreshold=2.

https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​feed.xml?view=rss&karmaThreshold=2

You can change the number at the end of the URL to any number you like. I don’t know if there are other ways to filter. I tried adding filter=frontpage, but it didn’t change anything that I could see (perhaps the feed is only frontpage posts by default). Would love to know about them if there are any other ways to filter the feed. Specifically, I would love to be able to

  • Exclude posts with certain tags

  • Filter on posts below a certain karma (I’d still like to still skim the titles of low karma posts, but somehow know that they are low karma without clicking through each one. If I could add a second feed for only low karma posts, I could skim it quickly and know that anything that got upvoted enough would eventually appear again in the high karma feed.) Realized this wasn’t particularly coherent, because all posts start with low karma.

I imagine RSS isn’t popular enough to warrant much development here (maybe there are stats on that), but hoping there are some more hidden filters or something.

--added--

After RobertM’s comment I dug through a bit and found out a couple, possibly useful things:

  • userId will allow you to get a feed of a particular user, but you have to find their userId (not the same as username). I was able to get this by searching the source of my user page for the 7th instance of userId. It’s followed by the string dbDpdpAYtcMPpHAiF. I added &userId=dbDpdpAYtcMPpHAiF to the end of the rss URL and that gave me a feed for only my own posts. Forum devs might want to consider adding this user-specific feed URL to user pages, instead of the main feed URL that’s there now.

  • You can get an RSS feed of only curated posts.

  • In the codebase, I also found what seemed to be rss feeds for community and meta, but they don’t appear to work (community-rss showed all posts and meta-rss showed a single event post from 8 months ago).

If anyone wants to dig more, RobertM’s links below, as well as here and here, might be a good place to start.