Opt out of RSS

[andrewducker]

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

Comments

[rowaasr13]

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]

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]

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

[andrewducker]

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.

[mercuryglitch]

correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole posting as Friends Only, Private, or a specific friends group would make it rather hard to duplicate the journal via an RSS feed.

At least it did back when I looked into something along these lines.

[andrewducker]

And some people are very happy to have their journal open to all _on livejournal_, but don't want it duplicated elsewhere.

[mercuryglitch]

so they want it publicly displayed

but only so long as it's the public that goes to livejournal.com/users/theirusername

um

...

sorry they lose the intarnet