Post Creation
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      Web Feeds & RSS Feeds

      Automate the population and creation of content in your community

      Using RSS feeds on Honeycommb, you can automatically publish content directly to a group or a profile inside your community. 

      In this article, we'll cover:

      About RSS Feeds

      How It Works

      Best Practices

      The Intended Behavior of RSS feeds 

      About RSS Feeds

      Honeycommb currently supports the following types of RSS feeds: 

      • RSS 1
      • RSS 2
      • Atom
      • Afterburner 

      How It Works

      • Every 30 minutes, Honeycommb will go and fetch the new content from the feed if there is new content. 
      • Honeycommb will pull the first image in the post from that RSS feed if there is an image.
      • Honeycommb won't import any HTML from the feed that is pulled from. 

      How To Configure RSS Feeds

      1. Head over to your "Web Feeds" section in the control center

      2. Specify the user that you'd like to publish content as 

      2. If you'd like, add a group to publish to:

      3. Insert the URL for your RSS feed:

      4. Check the "Acknowledge" box to acknowledge that you have the proper rights to syndicate content from this feed and/or that you assume content publishing duty from this content.

      Best Practices for RSS feeds

      A few tips and tricks to think about as you decide to pick an RSS feed publisher.

      Avoid Getting Too Noisy 

      Your RSS feeds can get noisy, naturally using this as a feature means that content is going to auto-pull from an external source. In doing this, it could easily create an overwhelming content experience -- and you want to avoid that. So, be sure that whatever RSS feed toolset you opt to leverage isn't just publishing content for the sake of publishing content, but adding value consistently!

      Ensure You're Always Adding Value

      RSS feeds can be a great tool or a harmful tool. In everything that you do, your goal should be to add value to the community and user experience. Don't just publish content via an RSS feed because you don't have content, it's important that the purpose of your RSS feed is to add meaningful content for discussions and conversations to your network!

      Create A Separate Account / Profile to Publish From

      Don't use an account (i.e. your admin account or leader account) to publish your RSS feed content. Because this is automated and there could be a LOT of that content, make sure to give people the option to unfollow or block that account. In doing this, you can ensure that they'll still get the content from your admin account. 

      Intended Behavior of RSS Feeds

      The following describe the intended behavior for RSS feeds. 

      I added an RSS feed but it's not pulling in all the items: 
      We only pull items in up to the time that the web feed is added to the system.
       
      Where is the link back to the original?
      We are not an RSS reader, we don't create linkbacks. We are simply reading what is in the feed and putting it into the body of the post.
       
      Why is there no media with the post?
      We read the media field off of the feed. If no media is present there, no media will be pulled in. This is up to the client to put the media in the correct place.
       
      Why is there only a snippet of the content?
      We read what is given to us in the feed. If they only provide a snippet, that is what gets displayed. The is up to the client to put the entire post into the feed if that's what they want.