RSS feeds with authentication

If your news reader does not work with cookie-based authentication, like the Apple Mail/Safari combination, you can add standard authentication directly to the URL of the RSS feed.

First grab the RSS feed’s URL you want to use from the RSS button in Safari’s or Firefox’s address bar. Then insert “username:password@” (replace “username” and “password” with your credentials, without the quotes) between “http://” and “www.devon…” and add “&auth=http” (without quotes) to the end of the URL. It then looks like:


http://eboehnisch:betyouwantoknow@www.devon-technologies.com/scripts/userforum/feed.php?f=16&auth=http

Add this URL to your news feed reader and it will pull the feed with authentication and so show, e.g., also otherwise hidden forums like the beta boards.

As the general forum feed also showed internal boards regardless of authentication I have removed all boards no open to the general public from the main RSS feed. If you are a beta tester, please add these boards manually to your RSS reader by visiting the respective board and then grabbing the feed from the RSS menu of your browser.

I have to comment on myself again. This feed stuff in phpBB3 is confusing and less from perfect. I cannot exclude the non-public boards without excluding them from ALL feeds. So, I have disabled the board-wide feed and enabled the forum-specific ones. You can now subscribe to any forum you are interested in and you will not receive any messages from the other boards.

Sorry for any inconveniences.

The latest update to version 3.0.7-PL1 (patch list?) claims to have fixed the bug. I have re-enabled the global feed which should now only show items according to the user’s permission (or the user credentials added to the feed URL (username:password@www.devon-tech … &auth=http)).