The feed works fine when accessed directly in a browser, but RSS readers and validators (like the W3C Feed Validator) receive a 403 error. This appears to be caused by Cloudflare’s bot protection blocking automated requests to RSS routes.
This is a known issue with Cloudflare-protected Discourse forums. A recent discussion on Discourse Meta documented the same problem and solution:
The fix involves adding a WAF rule to skip bot protection for requests ending in .rss. This allows RSS readers to function while maintaining security for the rest of the site.
Would it be possible for the discuss.google.dev administrators to implement this exception? RSS is a valuable way for community members to stay engaged without relying solely on email notifications.
After investigating this further, I discovered that even if Cloudflare’s bot protection were removed, Discourse’s RSS feeds are quite limited compared to browser/email notifications.
According to Discourse’s official documentation, the only user-level feeds available are:
/u/[username]/activity.rss — posts you made
/u/[username]/activity/topics.rss — topics you created
There is no RSS feed for replies to your posts, mentions, or notifications. This was confirmed in a 2022 feature request on Discourse Meta, where it was explained that such a feed would require authentication tokens to avoid leaking information about which topics a user is watching.
So while removing the Cloudflare block would still be welcome for other RSS use cases (like following categories or specific topics), it wouldn’t provide the “replies and mentions” monitoring that many of us want. For that, email notifications remain the best option.
After concluding that Discourse doesn’t offer RSS feeds for replies and mentions, I found a workaround: convert email notifications to RSS.
Requirements:
A server you control (I use Vultr) where you can run scripts
A dedicated Gmail account to receive forwarded notifications
Basic comfort with AI-assisted coding (“vibe coding”)
How it works (outline):
Configure Discourse to send email notifications for replies, mentions, etc.
Forward those emails to a dedicated Gmail account
A Node.js script on your server connects to Gmail via IMAP, reads the emails, and converts them to RSS XML
A cron job runs the script periodically (e.g., every 15 minutes)
Subscribe to the resulting XML file in your RSS reader
The script is about 200 lines of JavaScript. I didn’t write it from scratch—I described what I wanted to Claude (Anthropic’s AI) and worked through the implementation iteratively.
Is this practical? Probably not for most people. But if you really want RSS for Discourse notifications and you have server access, it’s doable. The AI handles the technical details; you just need to explain the goal and debug together.
Happy to share more details if anyone’s interested in trying this.