[mb-devel] Possibility of Implementing RSS Feeds for Artist Edits

[Aaron Cooper]

On 8/15/07, Simon Reinhardt <simon.reinhardt at gmx.de> wrote:
> > I've been thinking about subscribed edits and it really annoys me
> > having to open up 30 links every morning from an email and I was
> > wondering if it would be possible (before I bring it up with MB_Users
> > to see if people are interested) to create RSS feeds for each artists
> > edits.
>
> Hmm.. aggregating them would be a lot of work - either you use something like Pipes to merge them or do that in your feed reader if it has something like that (mine doesn't). So unlike you would want to combine different edit type feeds for different artists, I think feeds for artists themselves wouldn't be necessary if you had a feed for your subscribed artists.

Thanks for your response, Simon.  I think that limiting feeds to one
per person (subscribed artists) would probably be fine, but I can see
merit for having individual artist feeds as well.  One example is
someone may not wish to review accepted edits for *all* their
subscribed artists, only a few select ones.


> > It would be *very* cool if we
> > could vote from within an RSS reader, is that even possible?
>
> If your feed reader can display websites and can have you logged into them, sure.
>
>
> > It would also be neat if in addition to individual artist RSS feeds we
> > could have a feed for Subscribed Artists.  Might also be cool to have
> > feeds for each type of open edit so they can be browsed.
>
> Ok, this is for feeds in general now: I see two issues.
>
> First, while the simplicity of RSS helped feeds gain popularity, it also has a major drawback: performance. The fact that a single server gets hit by tons of requests checking for updates where there are none makes it suboptimal compared to systems where more servers get polled by fewer people each (like email or newsgroups). Compared to our current system I'm not sure which would be better, I guess only tests could reveal that. On the one hand you have the server sending of tons of emails once at a certain time each day, many of them which aren't read. On the other hand you have people polling the server with the requests being distributed over the day - but in case of badly configured readers you probably have people polling it every hour or even every ten minutes.

It would be silly to poll the system every 10 minutes and I would hope
the majority of readers would not give the option to refresh that
option.  But I think most users, especially those interested in
reviewing edits, would understand a polite request to set the feed to
update every 6hrs or daily, whatever we determine is appropriate.

I suppose it would even be possible to automatically detect when a
specific user is polling too often (since each user will have a unique
feed) and send them an email warning that their request will be
blocked for 24 hours if they continue polling this frequently or
something to that effect.


>
> Second, the subscription emails have a certain purpose: to get people to vote. Therefore they must draw people's attention to edits - and therefore I prefer the active sending of emails instead of passively waiting for people to subscribe to feeds.

Yes, I understand this point.  I think we need to make more effort
than just sending out emails to motivate people to study though.  I
have a couple ideas to help with this, but I will present them in
another email. :)

I do think that RSS feeds would be very useful for reviewing accepted
edits so perhaps we can split the subscription mail process into two
parts: a) informing user of open edits and b) advising user of
accepted edits.  Heading towards a more customizable subscription mail
system, we could give users the ability to subscribe to a feed of
"accepted edits" as I think this would provide many benefits:
1. It would make it easier to review accepted edits
2. It would provide a simple means of informing users of updates they
may find significant (they need to retag an album, for example)

Currently, it is silly to open 30 separate links from our subscription
email.  The least we could do is provide a link to "all accepted edits
for our subscribed artists during the time period (week) of the
email".   I think, however, that some people may find a feed more easy
to navigate as they can browse the accepted edits one at a time and
flag specific edits for review, etc (whatever special functionalities
their feed reader provides).


Regards,
-Aaron