Accept no substitutes

Cracking #UNC Lyris RSS for #noemail

I finally posted this to Quora this afternoon:

As part of giving up email aka #noemail, I need to get off of a lot of email lists that are important to me.
I had, as you are about to suggest, used Gmail filters to send lists to various folders where I mostly ignored the postings unless something urgent was going on there.
But I am more diligent with my RSS reader and I can scan it more easily. I keep seeing old postings about getting RSS from various mailing list programs like Pipermail and Mailman, but they really seem dated and abandoned.
To make matters worse, several campus lists are on Lyris which doesn’t seem to have much to offer in alternative reading styles. It’s either in your inbox or through a difficult to use web archive page.

Then I started poking into the UNC Lyris documentation for help. After pointing me to an unusable URL form ( http://example.com/read/rss?forum=forumname&rev=0.92 don’t even bother), I found this bit which looked promising and with a little improvisation worked! I apologize for the UNC-centric-ness of this post, but I hope it will be useful to others here in Chapel Hill.

RSS Access

ListManager’s RSS function supports authentication and authorization. The same settings controlling access to the Discussion Forum Interface controls RSS access.

RSS will only be available if your list is set to keep archives. Without archives, no messages will be displayed.

If the list allows visitors, then non-members will be able to subscribe to the list’s RSS feed without actually subscribing to the list. If not, members will need to log in to proceed to the About page and get the RSS URL. The login information will then be included in the RSS URL on the About page, and will be formatted to include your email address and password (encrypted).

Only those IP addresses granted access to the Discussion Forum Interface in Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Web: TCP/IP for Discussion Forum Interface will have access to the list via RSS.

ListManager will return messages from the past 14 days, up to one hundred messages.

Translation:

  1. Go to http://listserv.unc.edu
  2. Login using the mail address to which you used to subscribe to the lists that you would like RSS feeds from.
  3. Choose “My Forums” on the right side bar
  4. Choose the listname by clicking on it under “Forum Name”
  5. You’ll see recent messages to your chosen list (aka forum)
  6. Click on “About” on the right side bar
  7. The 3rd line should read “RSS Feed: RSS 0.92”
  8. “RSS 0.92” is a link! (but notice that RSS 2.0 is the current standard. Nonetheless 0.92 will work on most readers)
  9. Copy the Link
  10. Paste the link into your RSS reader of choice adding it as you would other links

1 Comment

  1. Jeffrey Pomerantz

    As an extra bonus, it appears that you can even get an RSS feed for a listserv you’re not subscribed to: in step 3, choose “All Forums” on the left side bar. In other words, you can unsubscribe from a listserv after you get its RSS feed.

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