Stardock's forums, across all of our sites, have a grand total of 1,949 RSS feeds.  That's a lot.  Each forum has a feed for pinned and for the currently discussed topics.  That's a lot of files to manage and support!  So we decided it was time to seek out someone who had a lot more experience with hosting massive numbers of RSS feeds. 

For this, we turned to our friends at Google, who have been incredibly helpful in the last few years with things like stat tracking, ad serving and other web services.

Google owns this company you might have heard of called FeedBurner.  What do they do?  They host, manage and track statistics on your RSS feeds.  You point them at a local file for your feed, and then you point your users at FeedBurner to get the actual content.  The result is that Feedburner takes the load, and the users get a more consistent and better experience from the RSS feeds.

In the past, our RSS feeds were spotty.  Sometimes they wouldn't update.  Sometimes they'd just be unavailable.  In fact, a few weeks back we had to turn them off because they were being accessed by so many people that it slowed down our servers.

Now I'm sure you want to know how to access these feeds.  Easy.  On any page that lists forum categories, there's an RSS button to the right.

Clicking on the RSS button will bring you to the feed hosted at FeedBurner, where you'll get a nice formatted view of the feed for your browser, with options to add it to your favorite news reader service.  I have several forums listed out in my Google Reader page, and on my Google homepage.  You can even grab the raw XML feed to insert into your given reader of choice.

Subscribing to forum RSS feeds is a great way to keep up to date on what's happening across all of our forums.