RSS Troubles

post by SquirrelInHell · 2018-01-13T08:07:25.181Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

Contents

3 comments

Some stuff that is currently broken about handling RSS feeds:

3 comments

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comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2018-01-14T01:12:47.641Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Huh, can you elaborate on your first bullet point? I would be happy to fix this but haven’t seen any invalid urls.

I don’t think I am fully getting your second bullet point. Could you describe a concrete scenario in which that is the case?

And yep, personal blog RSS feeds are coming soon, sorry for that not being there yet. As well as actually working personal subscription systems.

Replies from: SquirrelInHell
comment by SquirrelInHell · 2018-01-14T10:14:10.238Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I get links like this:

https://www.lesserwrong.com/feed.xml?view=%5Bobject%20Object%5D&karmaThreshold=0

One concrete scenario is: front page contains posts A(1 karma), B(2 karma) and C(3 karma). You subscribe to a RSS feed (frontpage, karmaThreshold=0) and it contains C, B (assuming max feed size is 2). RSS reader shows new articles C, B. Then someone downvotes C to -1 karma. The RSS feed contains B, A. RSS reader shows A as a new article. Note that this is not the full extent of the problem but I do not fully understand the other issues around this, like at some point I had 30 articles from Conor's sequence mysteriously pop up at the front of my "frontpage" subscription marked as new.

It's pretty much the case that the only usable RSS setup (that has no obvious compatibility issues) is having it act as a fixed-length FIFO queue, with no changes allowed except insertion of new entries at the beginning.