Guide · September 1, 2026 · 3 min read
Bringing the information to you
RSS has a reputation for being dead; mostly it has become invisible. Most sites, blogs, forums and game patch-note pages still publish one, and it is the simplest way to bring their posts into a Discord channel.
Contents
What RSS makes possible
A feed is a machine-readable list of posts: title, link, date, summary. Any site that publishes one can be followed with no authorisation, no key, and nothing for the site to do.
On a Discord server, four uses come up: a game's patch notes, a publisher's or a studio's announcements, a blog or specialist news site, and a forum's new topics.
The fourth is the least known and often the most useful: it lets you follow an external forum from Discord, without asking anybody to go and check it every day.
Finding the feed address
It is almost never advertised. Three leads, in order:
- Try the usual addresses:
/feed,/rss,/atom.xmlafter the site's address. - Look at the page's source: an
alternatetag declares the feed there. - Check the footer: many sites keep a discreet link.
If the site runs on a common blog engine, the first lead is enough in most cases.
A feed address is an address the bot will visit. A decent bot refuses internal addresses — local network, service addresses — and limits the size of what it downloads. Without those protections, having a feed followed becomes a way of making the server hosting the bot visit anything at all.
The initial wave
As with YouTube: on activation, the feed already contains posts. Announcing them all fills the channel with articles several months old.
The correct behaviour is to record the feed's state when it is added, and only announce what comes after. It is an implementation detail you notice immediately when it is missing.
Filter, or give up
Some feeds publish a lot. A news site putting out forty articles a day makes the channel unusable within a week, and members mute everything.
Two approaches. Filter on a keyword in the title — the game's name, the category you care about — which is enough in most cases. Or look for a narrower feed: many sites publish one feed per category or per tag, markedly more bearable than the general feed.
A third setting helps on large feeds: a cap on the number of posts per check. It stops a mass republication on the site's side from producing thirty messages in a row.
What to display
The title and the link are enough: Discord generates its own preview from the link, with the site's image and summary. Copying the feed's full description produces a duplicate, and sometimes badly rendered HTML.
A security note in passing: a feed's content is written by a third party. It must never be able to trigger an @everyone mention because the title contains one. A decent bot neutralises mentions coming from an external source.
Frequently asked questions
The site I want to follow has no feed
Third-party services build one from a page. They work, with the usual fragility: the slightest redesign of the site breaks the reading.
How often is the feed polled?
Every few minutes. Polling more often brings nothing and ends up getting blocked by the site.
Can a feed requiring authentication be followed?
Technically yes, but it means entrusting a credential to the bot. Best avoided: a private feed is not meant to be republished in a channel.
How many feeds per server?
As many as needed, but each in a suitable channel. Mixing a game's patch notes and a blog in the same channel makes both less readable.
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