> Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.