I just noticed that DigitalPoint (like many vb3 driven forums) has their own rss feed available at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/external.php how often is it refreshed / how often am I allowed to call it from your server via my rss reader?
It's not "refreshed"... it hits the database in realtime. So it's always completely up to date. As far as how often you hit it, if you do it in an automated fashion, not more than every 30 minutes is preferable. I made the mistake of hitting it in realtime for the "5 latest posts" feed on all our free tools. Of course those get millions of hits/day, so needing to hit the RSS feed that often brought the forums server to a crawl... So instead I made a static file for the tools that is updated only when there is a new thread.