Website feeds
What's that icon?
This website provides 'feeds' to enable you to keep up with website activity without having to visit the site. Everywhere you see the this icon: 
, you can subscribe to the feed for that page to get updates. This feature is often known as RSS feeds or syndication.
How do I use it?
If you click on the link you will likely just see a lot of text in your browser, since feeds are not designed to be viewed in a browser. Instead, to use a feed you will need a 'feed reader'. This is a program that downloads the feed at regular intervals and notifies you of any updates. There are many feed reader programs available for most platforms, and you can also use feeds with online services such as the customised Google home page and Bloglines.
In general, you right click on the feed icon and copy the link location, then copy this URL into your feed reader. The webpage also has the URL of the feed embedded in it behind the scenes, and services such as bloglines are also able to detect this, so you can just copy and paste the URL of the web page (in the location bar at the top of your browser) into the feed reader, and it will find the associated feed.
Modern browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Konqueror have built-in support for feeds. When they detect a feed on a page, they display an icon either in the location bar or in the status bar (either one similar to one displayed above, or a box with the letters 'RSS'), and they often have features to use or integrate the feed into your system.
Subscribe by email
You may prefer to receive email updates instead of using Atom feeds and a feed reader. Click on the email icon (
) on the relevant page and you will be taken to an external service (rssfwd.com) that converts Atom feeds into emails. You simply have to enter your email address and press 'Subscribe'.
What feeds are available?
Just about every page on this site that can have a feed has one! For example, you can subscribe to a forum to get updates of all new topics on that forum, or subscribe to an individual topic to see all new posts in that topic. You can even subscribe to an individual member's posts (go to that members page and view their 'recent posts'). In each case just browse to the relevant web page and use the feed to links to.
There are also some global feeds on pages that are harder to find:
If there is any page that doesn't have a feed, but could have one and you'd find it useful, let us know.
Format
The specific feed format used for the feeds is Atom, which is very widely supported. You will see the word 'RSS' used on lots of site, and it refers to a very similar things -- just about everywhere you see 'RSS', you can also use Atom instead, only Atom works more reliably.