Joe - or anyone - if you want to understand RSS feeds, you need to try it.

Download RSS Owl: http://www.rssowl.org/

This is a very old-fashioned reader, but it has the advantage of just being a feed reader rather than a lot of other things as well.

A good example of rss in a forum is concertina.net. So add these two feed URLs:

New threads: https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/rss/1-home.xml/
New posts: https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/discover/all.xml/

You don't need a c.net account.

I skim read those two feeds most days. I can read the posts in my Android rss reader without visiting the forum itself unless I want to review the whole thread, subscribe to it, or download an attachment.

When you've seen what rss does, try the mudcat feeds.