On Dec 6, 2004, at 3:15 PM, Nick Triantos wrote:
I'm confused, wouldn't that Special:Watchlist
page be generated based
on the logged-in user? In other words, if I RSS subscribe to that page
from my PC, I'd just see my own watchlist, right?
If you read RSS directly in your browser, perhaps. But that won't help
you in your standalone RSS feed reader application (which might be an
aggregator serving out your favorite feeds via HTTP).
An RSS news reader appears to the server as just another HTTP user
agent, but it won't know how to use our forms to log in or maintain the
login session cookies. Some (many?) readers can use HTTP
authentication, perhaps via the URL (eg
http://user:pass@example.com/feed.xml), but MediaWiki can't currently
authenticate you that way.
Alternately, a username could be passed as a query string parameter,
either along with a password/hash/token (potentially unsafe -- this
will appear in proxy and server logs in addition to going over the wire
raw) or after an explicit opt-in by the user to allow reading the
watchlist without authentication.
- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)