Change RSS topic feed to show unique topics only

Hi,

We just made the following change to our forums (using version 9.06). By default, RSS_topic_feed.asp shows the most recent posts (or threads), but if you had one very popular topic, you see multiple items on this subject. We wanted to show the 10 distinct most recent updated topics.

In RSS_topic_feed.asp, where the SQL query between lines 129 and 158 is put together  you want to change the query so that instead of referencing tblthread.thread_id you use tbltopic.last_thread_id instead:

Around line 139:

"AND " & strDbTable & "Topic.Topic_ID = " & strDbTable & "Thread.Topic_ID " &_

And line 156:

"ORDER BY " & strDbTable & "Thread.Thread_ID DESC"

You can't simply insert DISTINCT into the query because in the original code the message field is a TEXT object, and the message_date and thread_ID would always be distinct anyway. Below is the revised query:

SELECT TOP 100 tblForum.Forum_name, tblTopic.Topic_ID, tblTopic.Subject, tbltopic.last_thread_id,
tblthread.message_date, tblthread.message, tblAuthor.Author_ID, tblAuthor.Username
FROM tblForum, tblTopic, tblthread, tblAuthor
WHERE tblForum.Forum_ID = tblTopic.Forum_ID AND
    tbltopic.last_thread_id = tblthread.thread_id AND
    tblauthor.Author_id = tblthread.author_id AND
    --permissions stuff edited out for clarity
ORDER BY tblTopic.last_thread_ID DESC;

Hope this helps anyone else.

Dan