It is possible to get it coded if someone will code it, indeed.

^o^

Uh, so would you want to get it to display the news available to your
character or just the general newsgroups? The user/pass information has to be
passed in plaintext if you want the society-news and guildnews that are not
available to everyone.

That's like a 'WOW!' piece of information, Nerya BatMUD is telnet-based, do
you think anyone who passes his password here to log in does it in an encypted
fashion?

^o^

No, but in an automated RSS-feed, the password will also get saved somewhere
on the computer, in the same plaintext. Though I guess we could run that
through some md5-function and give the players an ingame-command to create the
hash.

Anyway, this is really for the offline discussion, but. Only poorly coded
RSS-readers are saving passwords in plantext. Moreover, you don't need to let
players generate md5 hash from their passwords it will remain unique every
time, so you can hash it on clientside (not sure if any client can do that)
and hash it on receiving side, voila, password authentication done. Then, we
do have SSL certificates available on www.bat.org, you can make RSS only
available on SSL side, there's your encryption. And last, but not least, we
don't give a flying f*ck if some clients save passwords in plaintext. I bet
90% of people who use TF user auto-login and their tfrc is full of their
passwords.

^o^