Comments | suggestions: Opt out of RSS

andrewducker in suggestions

Opt out of RSS

Jan 19, 2005 00:45

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 ( Read more... )

syndication, security, § rejected

Comments 79

rowaasr13 January 20 2005, 09:05:39 UTC

If you really want to duplicate someone's journal, you can just read and parse their journal directly, even if no feed is present. This would require just a bit more programming on parser and will give LJ more load, because journal layout elements would be redownloaded each time if journal is downloaded and parsed directly. There's already security settings, so why bother with solution that does not stop syndication, but only makes it a bit harder for those who want copy of journal and heavier on LJ.

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".

andrewducker January 20 2005, 09:08:02 UTC

Because some people aren't happy about (say) bloglines duplicating their entire journal.

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.

rowaasr13 January 20 2005, 09:18:41 UTC

As I've explained above, disabling RSS won't stop duplication. Data is still here to download, after all, just in another form.

andrewducker January 20 2005, 09:21:57 UTC

Yes, but bloglines (for instance) will only take an RSS feed. Which means that they wont duplicate a journal that doesn't have one.

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.

Thread 7

johno January 20 2005, 09:11:09 UTC

Any public web page can be "scraped" to create a RSS by a 3rd party.

If you don't want any RSS feed of your journal made public, take it friends only.

andrewducker January 20 2005, 09:17:21 UTC

If it's so easy, why does LJ bother to produce an RSS feed at all?

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.

mercuryglitch January 20 2005, 09:21:48 UTC

they do, it's called security settings.

:( decadence1 January 20 2005, 09:24:00 UTC

Agreed.

Thread 13

decadence1 January 20 2005, 09:22:56 UTC

I'm against this but it's WHY I'm against it that's important:

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 ( ... )

andrewducker January 20 2005, 09:24:36 UTC

It's not referenced - the contents are exactly duplicated, elsewhere (sans formatting).

RSS decadence1 January 20 2005, 09:29:40 UTC

Again ONLY if they're public (available to anyone around the globe with a web browser) and not backdated.

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.

:-(

burr86 January 20 2005, 09:28:00 UTC

six billion internet users? surely you're off by an order of magnitude or five? ;)

Thread 13

(The comment has been removed)

Re: no vvalkyri January 20 2005, 14:12:12 UTC

One thing I'm noticing that hasn't been mentioned: LJ have been willing to block spiders; whatever sites pick up this feed presumably does not.

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.

crschmidt January 20 2005, 11:57:16 UTC

Public is public. If you don't like it, don't post public.

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.

pinterface January 20 2005, 20:49:35 UTC

I feel the same way about FOAF and the userinfo page. ...

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?

crschmidt January 20 2005, 21:05:38 UTC

The thing is, there's a huge conceptual difference between human-readable and machine-readable.

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.

pinterface January 21 2005, 01:07:18 UTC

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: ( ... )