Title
Opt out of RSS
Short, concise description of the idea
An option to opt out of RSS/ATOM and any other syndication method that LJ chooses in the future
Full description of the ideaSome people aren't happy at the fact that sites like bloglines can duplicate their journal. They don't realise that this is an effect of having an RSS feed of it, and
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Comments 79
There's other problem. Many people read lots of popular journals with RSS reader. If someone disables RSS, he also disables access for such users.
RSS is just another form of representation (it can be even emulated with custom S2 style, actually!), so I don't see why "disable RSS" idea is anything better than, say, "disable using ?style=mine".
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Doesn't bother me, but after the third time I bumped into someone concerned their entire journal was duplicated elsewhere, I thought that it should at least open it up as a topic for discussion.
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Which means that giving people control over their RSS/Atom feeds would allow them control over whether the blog aggregation services redisplayed the content of their blogs.
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If you don't want any RSS feed of your journal made public, take it friends only.
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Oh, yes, it's because 99% of the time people won't bother to scrape a site, because 99% of people wouldn't even think of it.
There are always ways around these things - but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't have at least some basic control over what form their journal appears in.
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I think this is intrinsically BAD for LiveJournal. Take this quote:
The internal view painted about LiveJournal users was certainly true in the past but it's now changed. All accounts now have their own RSS feed so non-LJers can see into our world, and LJ users can create syndicated accounts for outside sites which then can be added to LJers' friends pages. This suggestion being implemented would set LiveJournal back in my opinion. While it technically could be re-enabled it's another option people won't know about ( ... )
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Disabling by default has no real benefit I can see (security through obscurity/cross your fingers & hope, rather than using security settings), will destroy their ability to search via the integrated Feedster tool and will (in my opinion) just make anybody who wants to create a blog jump though hoops to configure it to a point that other journalling/blogging sites all start at - my point that it's bad for LiveJournal.
:-(
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(The comment has been removed)
Yes, security through obscurity is not security.
At least not very good security.
But still, I have a halfway decent idea who's reading right now, and have somewhat less of an idea as an RSS feed.
The problem with friends-only is you have to 1) friend all your readers and 2) hit your 'shadowpeople' over the head until they get an lj account. And I've got a fair number of friends who read my public posts.
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I feel the same way about FOAF and the userinfo page. You know what you're displaying publicly, if you don't like it, don't post it.
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The thing is, there's a huge conceptual difference between human-readable and machine-readable. I don't care if Joe knows I'm friends with Bob (userinfo), but I do care if he makes a chart detailing my relationships (FOAF, fdata). Similarly, I don't care if Frank knows what I look like, but I do care if he takes a picture. Would you suggest I wander around wearing a ski mask, rather than ask him not to take a picture?
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HTML is machine readable: That's how your browser displays it. Just because FOAF is slightly better defined than the HTML that LiveJournal uses to generate the userinfo page (I say slightly, because LiveJournal contributes to approximately 80% of the available FOAF: the format isn't much better known than the userinfo page itself), how does that change things significantly?
LiveJournal uses tags to indicate who is a user on your friends page. It uses a well defined format, available in CVS, to display the information.
How is HTML less machine readable than FOAF data in this case?
Arguing the picture thing with me is not going to get you anywhere: I think that Frank should be able to take that picture of you, and I don't really think anything other than courtesy is preventing him from taking that photo. I have lots of pictures of people who have asked me not to take said pictures. I'm not very good at listening, or at being courteous.
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The books on my bookshelf are machine-readable, too, thanks to OCR, but that doesn't mean they're meant to be read by a machine. Technically, a machine can read most anything a human can; that doesn't mean the objects were designed with that in mind. (-readable seems to have been a poor choice of terminology on my part, but hopefully you can see what I mean)
Or, if I take out the machine: it's okay if Julius discovers my friendship with Bob because all three of us just happen to take the same bus route every day, but it's not okay if Julius learns about it by stalking me. Bots are a lot like stalkers.
Putting "Do not duplicate" on a key doesn't prevent a key from being copied any more than putting up a speed limit sign prevents people from speeding or not putting up an RSS/FOAF/whatever feed keeps the information from being obtained in other methods; what it does do is, basically, ask that you don't. That some people will still do what you've asked them not to doesn't invalidate the asking (if it did there'd be no point to laws: ( ... )
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