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Sensible control panel heading when you think about it I guess.
I beg to differ
The CP page title "External Data Provider" sounds like it's to do with data coming into the forums from an external source, whereas vBulletin use it as a kind of catch-all term for the way the forum can provide data other than as web pages. It's tautologous to define "external data" as "data that the forum makes available externally" as any web site is inherently an "external data provider" in that sense.
The various settings on the relevant control panel page show that it's a place where they've shovelled a bunch of disparate features as and when they've added them. It should be called something sensible like "Other Ways of Providing Forum Content". Yes, that's a bit long-winded, but my preferred choice of "Other Representations" relies too heavily on people understanding the distinction between the resource denoted by a URL and the nature of the representation of that resource (which is denoted by the Content-Type header when the resource is accessed via HTTP 1.x). Experience has taught me that some of the best webdevs in the world can get confused by that one: it's one of those concepts that is so simple that one has to abandon an enormous amount of mental baggage to grasp the utter simplicity of it, yet it's one of the fundamental principles underpinning the architecture of the web. Ho hum
As for the section in question: I think the "Thread Cache Lifespan" title is also dumb - how about "Feed Update Frequency"?
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