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How do I restrict access to my RSS feed?

Make your RSS feed private by requiring authentication tokens to control who can subscribe to your announcements.

Chelsea Davis avatar
Written by Chelsea Davis
Updated this week

Summary

You can restrict access to your RSS feed by enabling the private RSS option in your API & RSS settings. This generates a unique authentication token that must be included in the RSS URL, preventing unauthorized access to your feed.

Private RSS feeds are great for private pages and public pages where subscription options should be restricted to Email and Slack.

⚠️ Note: Anyone with access to the full URL including the token will have access to the content of the feed.

Steps

  1. Navigate to Settings → API & RSS in your LaunchNotes workspace

  2. Toggle on Make it private

  3. Copy the updated URL that now includes your authentication token

  4. Share this complete URL (including the token) only with authorized subscribers

To customize a private feed for specific categories or roadmap items:

  1. Create a custom view on your published page with the categories or items you want to include

  2. Copy the URL parameters from that custom view (everything after the ? in the URL)

  3. Combine three parts in this exact order:

    • Your feed URL: https://yourpage.launchnotes.com/feed.rss

    • Your private token: ?token=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE

    • Category parameters: &categories=cat_ABC123,cat_XYZ789&view=complete

Example of a complete private, filtered RSS URL:

https://updates.launchnotes.com/feed.rss?token=23hiuf33i4hHR$i3fhfUERHIUhebf34f3f8uoiwh&categories=cat_E9sq1rHZsOeAo,cat_t6don67r9qZht&view=complete

Notes & important info

  • Important: Anyone with the complete URL including the token can access your feed content. Only share the full URL with authorized subscribers.

  • Private RSS feeds are ideal for private pages or public pages where you want to limit subscription options to email and Slack only.

  • Note: You must be a workspace admin to enable or disable private RSS feeds.

  • If you need to revoke access, you can generate a new token in the same settings page. This will replace the original token and immediately cut off access for anyone using the old URL.

Troubleshooting

  • If the RSS feed isn't loading, verify that the complete URL including the token is being used

  • Confirm you're copying the entire token value without any spaces or missing characters

  • If you've recently regenerated your token, update all locations where the RSS URL is shared with the new URL

Related Articles
How do I share my announcements through RSS?
Customize RSS feed with URL parameters
How do I control which Publishing Channels receive my announcements?
How do I control who can view my LaunchNotes page?
How do I configure advanced email settings?
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