RSS Feed For Our Latest Posts/Comments?

February 17, 2005 6:26 PM

Matt seems to be going gangbusters on new features, so I'm not sure if this is the best or worst time to request another pony. This one is for some more RSS feeds...[more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to Feature Requests at 6:26 PM (30 comments total)

I'm working on a project to aggregate all my stuff from around the web (delicious, flickr, my weblog posts, comments in various places, if I can scrape 'em) on one page, via, in my case, mt-rss for Moveable Type. Others around the weblogging traps (including Matt, if I recall correctly) have been talking about this sort of thing lately, so I hope it's not just a me! me! me! thing. I wonder if maybe we could get rss feeds for our latest posts and comments, ones made to Metafilter and Ask Metafilter especially, but universally would be the coolest.

I'd understand if it were a MeFi Pro thing (which seems to be back on the cards from recent comments Matt has made), but I'd love to have it as a default feature.

Any interest from others? Any chance of seeing it, Matt?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:27 PM on February 17, 2005

Yeah, that would be cool. Of course, this would be the killer:

Metafilter and Ask Metafilter especially, but universally would be the coolest

The way ponies roll out to one site but not the others is painful. With all the new ponies, I keep thinking "why aren't all 3 sites just different brandings on one platform?" If I were - ahem - and I'm not - I'd unify the sites before I invested any more pony time in anything.
posted by scarabic at 6:49 PM on February 17, 2005

I'm all for sitewide code unification. Many of the ponies seemingly revolve around this.
posted by geekyguy at 7:06 PM on February 17, 2005

Yeah, I was just talking to George Hotelling about this today. He wanted a feed for his userID that contained his last ten posts to anywhere on metafilter's servers.

I said that yeah, it's a cool idea, though wouldn't it encourage those who semi-stalk others to follow folks around so they can argue and goad them. I can think of dozens of folks that frequent political threads that might be prone to following someone just to mock their posting style or goad them into little fights. I have a feeling ~wink~ some folks with well known usernames_at_theirdomain.org would be followed around and political scuffles would get even more personal than they are.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:09 PM on February 17, 2005

Of course, as I've said with other features, such a feed would also make it easier for you to SEE when someone is doing that. Greater visibility gives greater power to the trolls and fuckwits, but also the admins.
posted by scarabic at 7:19 PM on February 17, 2005

How would I have any greater visibility? Am I supposed to follow every problem user's feed?

I think the net result would be userfoo and userbar getting into arguments on every single thread they participate in. I don't think that's an improvement for the site, and just greases the wheels on enabling bad behavior.

Like I said, I would love to do this, but I don't want it to have a net negative effect on the site and I'm looking for reasons or ways to mimize that.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:28 PM on February 17, 2005

What the heck is RSS anyway? I never heard of the acronymn until MeFi. I hear people talking about it, but I have no clue what an RSS feed is.
posted by Doohickie at 7:33 PM on February 17, 2005

I don't think it would have a net negative effect. People who want to stalk others have a pretty handy tool in the user pages. I stalk my favorite users because they often have a better nose for interesting threads than I do. I think many more people would use this feature for good purposes than for bad. If it's not too much trouble, I say try it and see. Thanks for the suggestion, stav.
posted by squirrel at 7:57 PM on February 17, 2005

Like I said, I would love to do this, but I don't want it to have a net negative effect on the site and I'm looking for reasons or ways to mimize that.

I hear you, but I'm not sure how having a comments feed would add that much more visibility and trackability for a stalker/antagonist type. I mean, they could just bookmark their Direst Enemy's recent comments page and achieve the same thing, right?

Ah well. I leave it to you to decide, but it'd still be a pretty pretty pony.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:02 PM on February 17, 2005

By the way, anil, if you read this, it'd be a cool feature for Typekey-authenticated MT and Typepad comments too (unless it already exists, and I've missed something)!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:07 PM on February 17, 2005

stravros, you could do this now just by scraping their recent comments page. What you're talking about is just an RSS'ification of that page, right?
posted by nixerman at 8:08 PM on February 17, 2005

Basically, yeah. It seems Matt's not super-keen on scraping, at least on a large scale, but if he's cool with it and someone can point me towards a how-to on doing that, I'd be happy to give it a blast, for my own purposes, anyway.

Also, tangentially, I think that this kind of thing might prod people towards taking more care with their comments. It would me, if all my comments were popping up on The Wonderchicken Portal@trade;...
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:14 PM on February 17, 2005

™, damnit.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:15 PM on February 17, 2005

How would I have any greater visibility? Am I supposed to follow every problem user's feed?

Are you saying you don't monitor certain users to see if they're cracking? I've seen you do it numerous times. There have been multiple "X is a chronic jerk" callouts recently. Wouldn't the ability to summarize all of a user's recent contributions make it easier for you to take a peek at what they've been up to and identify potential problems? You make it sound like I'm imposing a new admin function on you: managing problem users. But you already do that. All I'm proposing is that per-user RSS feeds would make the per-user admin you already have to do easier.

As for people misusing such a feature to haunt and heckle one another... I just don't see it. I honestly don't see lots of people applying such a feature to the nefarious purposes you cite, Matt. And anyway, you don't manage trolls by withholding features.

And consider that 99% of us are neither admins nor trolls, and might get a lot of everyday utility out of such a feature. This is about adding convenience for lots of normal folks. The few, proud trolls among us don't need convenience to carry out their mischief.
posted by scarabic at 8:59 PM on February 17, 2005

I have no formal user tracking. I just watch posts and notice patterns and two months later when someone complains about a user I think "huh, I seem to recall them doing bad things" or more likely "huh, never heard of 'em". Making a tool to make that more explicit isn't something I'm interested in.

I'll program this once I can figure out an efficient way to grab the recent post IDs from three databases, stuff that into RSS, then figure out a way to cache RSS so thousands of folks aren't trying to get RSS updates every two seconds.

Anyone got ideas on how to solve those problems?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:11 PM on February 17, 2005

Making a tool to make that more explicit isn't something I'm interested in.

Okay, man, don't take offense. I'm just sayin' you could make use of such a thing if you did. If you aren't then don't.
posted by scarabic at 9:34 PM on February 17, 2005

Anyone got ideas on how to solve those problems?

Partner up with Feedburner somehow? [/no real idea]

(Also, scarabic, you been taking admin-hectoring lessons from crash_davis and quonsar lately? Sheesh.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:38 PM on February 17, 2005

If I point out that a particular pony might be even more worth the time to build because it could have utility for admins, is that automatically a criticism/hectoring of the job Matt does as an admin?
posted by scarabic at 9:50 PM on February 17, 2005

No, of course not. But tone, as is so often repeated, is pretty hard to put across in text. And perhaps I misjudged yours.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:01 PM on February 17, 2005

Well... I am a little surprised to hear Matt defend a keep-everything-in-his-head strategy now that he's taken on admin help from another person. It just doesn't seem sustainable. Unless Jessamyn has been an alter ego all along... ?

I think Matt is a little more accustomed to being king of his domain, fingers in the database, no one to answer to, and I am a little more accustomed to handling community admin in a rules-based, sysetmatic, large-scale, tool-centric & low-effort approach.

This simply reflects the differences between my professional background and his. Neither of us is "wrong." His own achievements are beyond reproach. The company I've cut my teeth with is now a major public player. Differences of opinion? Go figure.
posted by scarabic at 11:27 PM on February 17, 2005

I am a little surprised to hear Matt defend a keep-everything-in-his-head strategy

Tending to the social admin duties is the most time and effort intensive, with the least amount of payoff. Strictly speaking, worrying about people fighting it what kept me from updating any code for the past year or so. Having Jessamyn be the eyes for conflicts lets me code stuff like I've done. So I'm not defending any strategy, just saying that I want to watch users less, not more, so I'm personally not interested in building this tool for my own use. That doesn't mean I won't build it, I will, once the tech challenges are met.

So again, if anyone has ideas on how best to efficiently grab, store, and serve the data, I'm all ears. What would the perfect RSS file look like for user x? just urls leading to their posts and comments? More than that?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:37 PM on February 17, 2005

I want to watch users less, not more

I hear you there, but how does making more efficient user-watching tools equate with making more user-watching work, not less? Really, perhaps I'm not understanding or representing per-user RSS feeds correctly. That's totally possible. But all I meant to say is that it would be a heck of a lot easier to keep tabs on trouble children if a user's behavior were easier to scan with a single click. Maybe in your world this just means less work for Jessamyn. I have no idea how you've divided labor.
posted by scarabic at 11:41 PM on February 17, 2005

how best to efficiently grab, store, and serve the data

I really don't have any suggestions there. Is the unification of the triumvirate out of reach? If you declare it so, then I guess it's not worth considering. But things like generating a per-user RSS feed across sites would be much closer to no-effort if it weren't

three databases

n'est-ce pas?
posted by scarabic at 11:44 PM on February 17, 2005

Is the unification of the triumvirate out of reach? If you declare it so, then I guess it's not worth considering.

I didn't mean it that way, just that I know I'm missing something really obvious. Stuff in ask metafilter, metatalk, and metafilter post and comment tables all have link id's and comment id's and user id's and it's pretty easy to say "give me all metafilter comments in the past 24 hours by mathowie" but going into five other tables to say the same thing is wasteful, and I'm not seeing how to do it all in one query.

three databases

n'est-ce pas?

I meant tables, not databases.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:50 PM on February 17, 2005

scarabic, I'm having trouble determining if you're really trying to help anymore, or if as stavros noticed, you seem to be busting my balls a bit here (why post my webcam?).

I don't really want to discuss how I admin the site or what tools I use or need, as I've already said why I wouldn't use this for my personal benefit, but again, I do want to build it if it's easy to do. I would like to know how to write a better SQL db query to get this feature out the door, so if you've got anything to add for that, I'm all ears.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:54 PM on February 17, 2005

What if you put the RSS feed behind HTTP auth? Then only the user could get it, and no one could cyber-stalk.

Although nowhere else on the site uses standard HTTP auth, so that might be a bit tricky / fun. Maybe easier to have the user pass the username/password as HTTP GET parameters. Since it wouldn't be a public URL, this wouldn't be the normal security nightmare.
posted by smackfu at 8:15 AM on February 18, 2005

I don't really want to discuss how I admin the site

Okay, fair enough. I promise you, I am only trying to be helpful. I can't promise I will not fail in that endeavor.

Actually I do read your blog sometimes and I thought for sure the webcam was post-worthy. I like webcams. You're our #1. Nothing personal or nefarious.
posted by scarabic at 8:32 AM on February 18, 2005

but going into five other tables to say the same thing is wasteful, and I'm not seeing how to do it all in one query

Inner Joins? Views? You can easily join up tables if they have common keys (e.g. UserID).....or am I seeing it too simple here?).
posted by FieldingGoodney at 9:05 AM on February 18, 2005

You could pretty easily use del.icio.us to track yourself. Simply post each post or comment you make to del.icio.us, give them a unique tag like myposts or mycomments (I just use tracks) and then scrape the resulting del.icio.us RSS feed...nice thing about that it it works everywhere, long as there's a url...

...wouldn't help for stalking others though.
posted by 31d1 at 9:59 AM on February 18, 2005

It doesn't need to be that efficient Matt, just cron up a job to run the query for all users every hour or so and serve the results as static. I don't think anyone expect real-time delivery.
posted by hardcode at 11:12 AM on February 18, 2005