RSS for Recent Activity September 21, 2010 10:28 PM   Subscribe

Is there any chance of getting a RSS feed for Recent Activity?

Maybe with a scrambled url (like the ones Google Calendar uses) if privacy is an issue?

Thanks.
posted by Memo to Feature Requests at 10:28 PM (11 comments total)

No, sorry, there isn't much chance of this happening. Recent Activity is one of the most server intensive things we do here. It works fine with the current load, but turning it into a feed would mean that automated programs are loading the same data at regular intervals. So instead of a human loading RA as needed, a computer would load RA every 20 minutes without fail whether it's needed or not. We aren't ready to add that kind of load to our servers.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:48 PM on September 21, 2010


That makes sense. Thanks for the quick answer.
posted by Memo at 10:51 PM on September 21, 2010


Hold on a second, that kinda doesn't make sense.

An RSS reader hits a URL serving an XML file of published items. That XML can be a static file regenerated at whatever interval works for your load requirements. Update it every 30 minutes if that's the best you can do. Or every hour. Or twice a day. You don't have to regenerate the feed by hitting the database on every web request for it.. that would be insane. I don't think anyone handles syndication that way. If they do, they are nuts.

Of course you wouldn't want to generate this feed for all 200k users (or whatever it is) if it's database intensive, so (a) make it a subscription thing so you aren't generating useless feeds, and (b) figure out how often people hit this page manually, calculate the processing time that takes, and come up with a refresh rate that uses the same resources. If people have a feed of it, they will stop hitting the Recent Activity link, so it's actually a zero-sum game, or close to it.

If I'm missing something crucial here, I apologize, but this really makes no sense to me as an argument against syndicating data. If anything, it will save you resources since people will not be loading static media while monitoring the feed. Presumably people who care about this already reload the page a lot, along with all the images, javascript, etc and will stop doing so if they get timely updates in their RSS reader.
posted by cj_ at 2:46 AM on September 22, 2010


The whole point of "recent activity" is currency, how up to date is it? If it were even an hour or 30 minutes old, that can be way too old.

So, yes, you're missing something fundamental. pb's answer makes perfect sense.

I expect it would take some major under-the-hood rejiggering to make this something MeFi was comfortable with. Facebook does monster amounts of processing, caching, sharding to do the kind of on-demand compilation of feed data like this. Check the High Scalability blog for other stories of how people have solved similar use cases.
posted by artlung at 5:33 AM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]


Update it every 30 minutes if that's the best you can do. Or every hour. Or twice a day.

None of those (twice a day?!) are often enough. When you're checking recent activity you pretty much want to see the most recent activity this very minute.
posted by John Cohen at 6:42 AM on September 22, 2010


sigh, I came in thinking I'd be able to get this pony... oh well
posted by The Lady is a designer at 6:48 AM on September 22, 2010


Recent Activity is one of the most server intensive things we do here.

I have a feeling around 1/10th of that is me. I'll try to keep it to a reasonable level.
posted by ODiV at 7:30 AM on September 22, 2010


cj_, the major issue you're missing is that "Recent Activity" is completely different for each and every user. It's an inherently 100% dynamic process, and so isn't well suited to syndication.

Then there's the security issue. Profile pages are not publicly available, so neither are a given user's links to their posts/comments/etc. You'd need an annoying layer of authentication on top of RSS to deal with that.
posted by mkultra at 8:25 AM on September 22, 2010


Profile pages are not publicly available, so neither are a given user's links to their posts/comments/etc.'
I may be misunderstanding you, but I just logged out and can still see profiles and click through to a list of all post or comment by any single person. Some info in profiles is not public, but most of it is.
posted by soelo at 10:50 AM on September 22, 2010


Huh, I did not know that.
posted by mkultra at 10:51 AM on September 22, 2010


They are not, however, indexed by search engines.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:34 PM on September 23, 2010


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