RSS feeds

There's nothing built into the software to allow for feeds of comments or replies, unfortunately.

I've switched the feeds to have them feed entire posts.

Yeah, I found that, it's what I meant by "built into the software." My only concern (beyond my general concern about adding modules that might slow the site down, cause problems, etc., which I have about all modules) is how feeding everything might affect bandwidth. How greedy are the most popular feed readers? I just use Google's Reader right now, and it only asks for the info from a feed when I select the feed, but I'm concerned about offline readers and the potential large quantity of sucked-down feed data that won't ever get read.

Yeah, probably not going to add any modules off the Drupal site. We're (possibly extraordinarily) paranoid due to having been hacked so much in the past, so don't want to add anything that feels even slightly skeevy.

I understand that LMS headers will allow the reader to ask the questions "is there any news" and "how much news is there" and "what are the titles of the news," but how does that affect offline readers? Don't offline readers grab the full feed contents regardless of that header info?

Right, it's not going to fetch things that have already been fetched. My concern is that it will fetch things that will never be read by a person, unlike the website itself where you only click on the link in order to read the posts.

It's pretty much only text, so it's probably not a huge deal bandwidth-wise, either way. Not sure where we are on that, anyway.

Done.