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Enabling Commenting RSS Feeds on a Secure System

The ability to subscribe to feeds of comments on a review system is a critical component of keeping current with your community's needs, questions, and requests. RSS feeds allow interested parties, and, most importantly, information developers to monitor commenting activity on a publication, topic, or site. This task explains how to enable commenting RSS feeds on a secure system, allowing access to applications, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Before you begin

You must have Manage App permission to edit the Global Config file.

About this task

Applications that read feeds, such as a feed reader or Microsoft Outlook, are unable to authenticate with the application when requesting a feed, as they are always treated as an anonymous user. Therefore, in a secure system where anonymous users do not have access to RSS feeds, all feed reading applications will not have access to the feeds.

Procedure

  1. If you are on a Legacy Content Delivery page, select Home in the breadcrumb trail.
    The Legacy Content Delivery landing page appears.
  2. In the Administration Tools pane, select Manage Application.
    The Manage Application page appears.
  3. In the left pane, select Global Config.
  4. In the right pane under Customized Config, select Add Item.
  5. In the Name field, enter rss.apikey.
  6. In the Value field, enter a randomized number. The key should be at least 20 characters and include numbers and letters.
    75a87-s65df-8y2373-8g8389-2ik82
    Once added, this API key will be appended as a parameter named apikey to all requests for RSS feeds when a user uses Subscribe. As users copy and paste or add these URLs to their feed readers, the apikey will be included in the URL.
  7. Select Save to dismiss the pop-up window.
  8. Under Customized Config, use Save to save the configuration.

Results

Any request to view an RSS feed that includes the correct API key (which matches your global configuration item) will bypass the system's security and return the RSS feed. Be aware that this API key could be shared, and unintentionally expose your RSS feeds beyond your intended audience.