RSS

RSS Feeds

RSS is a simple data exchange format that allows web sites to provide specific types of data in a manner that is easy-to-use in news tickers, or for syndication on other web sites (such as you would find on the sidebar of sites like FreshMeat or Slashdot. The RSS format can be used to export almost any sort of data, though is most commonly used today for the export of news data from web sites or for the export of blog entries.

SourceForge.net provides RSS feeds for various part of the site. Look for the RSS symbol for pages that offer a feed:

SourceForge.net strongly recommends that all developers, project teams, and regular visitors to the site use the Site Status RSS feed to keep up with changes on the site as well as service availability.

Access

RSS feeds contain specially formatted data, an XML data format, which is not usable by most web browsers. In order to make use of RSS feeds, you will need to install a special piece of software on your system, called a RSS reader or RSS aggregator.

There are many RSS readers available (for a variety of OS platforms). Several RSS readers are hosted on SourceForge.net. A number of lists of good RSS readers are available on the Internet; Google may be of use in finding an RSS reader for your OS platform.

The process for adding an RSS feed to your subscription list will vary from reader to reader; typically a facility to "Add a RSS feed" where you may enter the URL to the feed you wish to include.

Feeds from SourceForge.net

SourceForge.net provides a number of RSS feeds; these feeds consist of site-wide RSS feeds (i.e. related to data about a number of projects, or the SourceForge.net site itself) and project-specific RSS feeds.

Please see our Links to available site-wide RSS feeds. Project-specific RSS feeds are subject to availability based on the features the project administrator has enabled on their project; a list of the feeds available for a specific project may be found by using the browser's feed autodiscovery feature (through the RSS icon in the URL bar).

RSS options

SourceForge.net supports both http:// and https:// URI types for accessing RSS feeds. Most RSS readers do not currently support SSL, so you will generally need to use http:// URLs to access the provided RSS feeds.

Most RSS feeds provided by SourceForge.net may be adjusted using optional parameters. For example, some feeds permit you to specify that you want to see the full text of news items, not just the first paragraph (which is the default); some feeds also offer the ability to specify the number of entries you would like to receive in the RSS feed (which is helpful for people who only want to see ten items in the RSS feed, for instance). By providing these options, we help to ensure our RSS feeds will meet the needs of both people using a RSS reader application and those people who are syndicating RSS feed data on their web sites.

Each of the options we support on our RSS feeds is represented by text added to the URL for the RSS feed. In the "Feed options" sections for each feed description (below), you will see a listing of the text you will add to the end of the RSS feed's URL in order to enable the described option. The text you will add to the end of your URL is in the format: &option=value The finished URL will contain no spaces. If you choose to enable an option when accessing an RSS feed, we recommend that you test this in your web browser (you should get RSS data back) before adding this URL to your RSS reader; this helps to ensure your URL is well formed and will not cause any problems for your RSS reader (and that you get the desired outcome).

Acceptable use

The feeds made available by SourceForge.net are available for use by site end-users under our Terms of Use agreement.

It is our policy that end-users of these RSS feeds should not access the same feed more frequently than once per thirty minutes (i.e. 1 hit per feed per 30 minutes). Accessing a feed more frequently than this interval may be considered abuse (it adds load to our servers), and may result in account termination, blocking of your IP address from accessing SourceForge.net, or other consequences. Further, while we want to encourage you to use these RSS feeds to keep apprised of project developments, it seems unlikely that most people would have need to access more than 50 different RSS feeds at a time; all RSS feed accesses should be done serially, not in parallel, as to reduce load on our servers.

The RSS feeds themselves, data within the site-wide RSS feeds, and statistical data within the project-specific RSS feeds is under copyright by Geeknet, Inc., as described in the Terms of Use agreement. Project- and user-provided data are the responsibility of the project and/or user who posted that content, as described in the Terms of Use agreement.

Since project-specific RSS feeds contain project-related data, it is important that end-users of these feeds DO NOT post these feeds to RSS syndication services, such as Syndic8 unless they are an administrator for the project, or have direct permission from the project administrator to do so. Not all RSS feeds are useful to every project; the usability of individual project RSS feeds depend largely on the types of collaborative development activity in which the project takes part.

Project RSS Feeds

SourceForge.net provides a variety of services to hosted projects; the decision of which services the project will actually use is left up to the project administrator. Project administrators are permitted to disable the use of specific SourceForge.net project features using the project admin interface, as to reduce confusion.

Since some projects may be using only a subset of the features we offer, and may have disabled some of these features entirely, only a subset of the RSS feeds made available for a project may be of functional use, or be available. RSS feeds related to disabled project features will appear to be disabled or empty.

OSS Software Research

The RSS feeds provided by SourceForge.net ARE NOT provided for large-scale data collection, as is often needed by Open Source software researchers; excessive hits to these RSS feeds will be considered abuse and may result in account termination, blocking of IP addresses from accessing SourceForge.net, etc. If you are in the process of performing Open Source software research, please contact the SourceForge.net staff team by submitting a Support Request. Given notice of your research plans, we will be able to assist you in retrieving data in a more functional (and less intensive) manner, saving you time, and saving us resources.