The forum needs feeds. :)
Nevermind; found it! :)
Good. For a split second there, I was suprised. The last thing Mises.org/com needs is more feeds, since they are dynamically generated and therefore potentially infinite at this point! Honestly, I don't know how people keep up with so many feeds (oh, google reader!)
Publisher, Laissez-Faire Books
And it gets even better! :
1. You can subscribe to a per-thread feed of all comments in a thread. That way, when you post something you can watch for followups. For me, this is far, far, far superior to email subscription. (In fact, I need to figure out how to turn off the automatic "subscribe by email" feature for me, if at all possible. I don't want that clogging up my email.) And of course this lets you watch a thread without posting. I had been a little disappointed when I discovered the main feed only listed the first post in each new thread, rather than all comments, but this works out better, actually, because I can subscribe selectively to those comments I want to see.
2. You can subscribe to a per-user feed of all posts by a user! So I can grab my own comments and put them on my Google shared items page/feed, and I can watch for people I think are insightful and subscribe to their comments, which in addition to giving me good insightful reading material will also help me locate threads that have become interesting that I might've dismissed after reading the first post.
I'm increasingly happy with this board software, after an initial impression of disappointment and feeling like I wouldn't participate much. Good job. :)
But the feeds are very poorly titled. The per user feeds are titled with the user's user number, which means you won't be able to tell whose comments you subscribed to. And the per-thread feeds get titled with the forum the threads are in (e.g. "About," "Economics Questions," etc.), which means you won't have the title of the thread you subscribed to.
Hint, hint. :)
I can't complain, in terms of feeds, this is the best forum software I've ever seen. And thankfully Google Reader lets me retitled the feeds myself, at least for my own personal subscription to them. But doing so is inconvenient, and I'm betting some programmer could change just a couple of things and fix it. :)
Another nit. :)
Posts from a per-thread feed are rendered into HTML. Posts from a per-user feed are not rendered; they show the source BB markup. For example, check out my current Google Reader shared items page:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12477422568653117389
I've got the exact same post shared twice: once from my own per-user feed, and once from the feed for the thread the post is in. The per-user feed version shows the [ quote ] tags, the per-thread version is rendered and has the quotes indented, etc.