Alright, I'll try to enable at least some of its functionality in the near future. (The trouble is that action=.xml has a whole bunch of options, and I know that some combinations of options end up resulting in minutes of computation. I need to figure it out.)
Note that I only sample that page every 10 minutes with exactly these options:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=255If there is another way to achieve something similar (a largish number of recent posts) I might look into it as well.