I have a forum set up which allows only the admin. to start a new topic. This is a "latest news" forum which feeds to my site's main page. Is there a way that I can allow users to respond to topics in that forum but not have their responses show up in the feeds? I only want the latest news posts from the admin to show up in the feed.

Sure, setup the feed to relay topics vs posts... Should be one of the options in the rss config in the cp

I think I had tried this before and users' posts were still showing up in the feeds even though 'new topics' was selected. I'll try again though and see what happens.