RSS Feeds: How would you use it?

So, albeit being a professional webdev, I don't really use RSS feeds. I've made um before, but never really used them myself. And I know that what a feed has and how it's used depends on the site. So I wanna know from you: would you use Gamers' Plane RSS feeds? If the answer is yes or maybe, the first question is what information you'd want feeds of. The second question is what program do you use to consume your RSS feeds?

As my first feed, I'm working on a games feed that will show any newly made games. Its a bit redundant, as if you setup your LFG, you'll get an email when a game of the type you are looking for gets created, but a list may still not be a bad idea. Its a simple enough feed to setup that'll let me make sure I didn't screw it up.

The obvious feed to go for is the forums, and that's where things get complicated. The public forums are fine, no big deal. From there, we get into interesting points. First, I don't know what RSS feed programs allow for authentication. I can do HTTP authentication, but that puts your username/pass in the feed URL, which isn't all that safe. If we can authenticate, then I can setup feeds that pull posts in a forum and all its subforums. Or would you prefer just the forum itself? A latest post feed?

I feel like if we can solidify what sort of feeds you guys would want to use, there's a lot of potential for general information dissemination. Give me your thoughts!

Since I'm probably the one who bugged you the most about RSS feeds, here's my 2 credits.

I want to use If This Than That to give me push notifications of new posts in games I'm a part of. Of course, if I'm following a game, I'd like to use Feedly to catch up.

As I'm not an HTML/web person, I apologize if this idea is not practical. What if each sub-fora had it's own feed? That way we could subscribe in our feed reader of choice to specific "places." For example, if we wanted to know about game discussions, we'd subscribe to the Games Tavern sub forum. Any new posts would be grabbed by the RSS reader.

What that means for games is that anyone can subscribe to public games, since you just visit their sub-fora and subscribe. For example, I could grab the RSS for the Sunken Secrets game—even though I'm not a player or GM—because it's a public game. If a game was private, however, only those allowed to view the game could grab the RSS feed.

This prevents you from needing to do authentication via RSS reader.

Nothing about your idea is unfeasible, and its the kind of direction I'm hoping to get. I can setup feeds to be just for a forum and not include its subforums, I can do it to include subforums, etc. I can look at maybe doing it so when you click an RSS link, it gives you an option for a "parent" RSS feed with subforums, or a "local" feed with just the posts in that forum.

However, the reason a feed would need to be authenticated is this: ideally, the feed URL would be simple, something like rss.gamersplane.com/forum/10/, which is the Games Tavern. If instead it was the Dresden game (rss.gamersplane.com/forum/117/), anyone could type in that link and get the feed. I'd want to authenticate it to make sure you had access to it. I could instead do a hash (rss.gamersplane.com/forum/sn38xmu7) but that's not user friendly, and gets harder to manage. You could also guess/share that link, thus meaning its no longer private.

is user-friendliness that big of a deal? Can't we just do a copy/paste of the URL into our RSS reader?

Its about good development, and easier maintenance. Its also about security. A 16 character random hash is only slightly more secure than a straight numbers.

I love RSS feeds for news sites and blogs, don't know that it would be THAT useful for this site, but that's my personal use case. I think if the user scenario is push notifications for game updates, I imagine there must be better alternatives than an RSS feed piped into IFTTT aggregated by feedly.

A few people have asked about RSS feeds, but its also why I'm asking about general interest and direction. If its only a couple people who are interested, I'll have to push it for more important/pertinent features.