Add comment image to RSS feed

[zvi]

Title:
Add comment image to RSS feed

Area:
RSS, playing well with others, comments

Summary:
Add the comment count image to the RSS feed.

Description:
Crossposted entries now include the comment count, which is great for individuals crossposting. However, communities can't crosspost, and we can't crosspost to non-LJ/DW sites yet. However, lots of things can grab our RSS feeds, and, for those reading via RSS, the comment count would be helpful to display as well. It would give some idea if there was a lively conversation someone should click over to, which is especially important for anyone whose RSS feed is for full text, which discourages people from clicking back to Dreamwidth.

The drawback would be increased bandwidth. I suppose there's a sort of loss of privacy maybe? I don't know.

Poll #1469 Add comment image to RSS feed

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

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This suggestion:

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Should be implemented as-is.
20 (64.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (6.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (6.5%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (22.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[cesy]

Privacy should be covered because the comment count is visible to anyone who can see the entry, so the same settings would apply as for locked entries already.

Are there existing standards for linking to comments on RSS feeds and/or displaying the comment count? If there are, we should use those, but otherwise, yes, the comment count would be good. Would it display as a new entry in someone's RSS reader every time the comment count changes, or would it just be a change to the existing entry?

[kyrielle]

I don't know about the existing standards, but I do know that as long as you keep the same id for the post, changes to the post shouldn't appear as a new entry in any valid/standard RSS reader (although it may, as it does in mine, change the font of the title of the existing post to show there was an update).

[zvi]

My idea was to use the image file we already use for crossposting, so the RSS doesn't change, we just automagically serve the appropriate image at the time of display.

[ratcreature]

I less than enthused about the idea because for me the comment image always shows as an image placeholder because it has no proper sizes so my friendspage always treats them as it would huge images and it has no real alt text either. I don't want that on even more posts.

[zvi]

There's a bug in for that. Don't know when it will actually happen.

[pauamma]

More directly appropriate, I think, would be a comment count item (for RSS2) or entry (for Atom) field, so the aggregator can act on it (eg, mark the entry if the field changed since the last check). I couldn't find an obviously suitable field in the core RSS2 or Atom specs, but maybe there's one in an extension?

[zvi]

I thought there was not such a standard, which is why people have implemented the automagic gif hack, which is what we use for crossposting.

The other problem is that, depending on the feedreader, every change to an entry may create a bump, either pushing the entry up in prominence or multiplying its presence in your reader. See ew_tvwatch_feed for a look at what LJ/DW style software does when the same entries are constantly being re-named or re-tagged or whatever. It's pretty ugly.

[pauamma]

Hmm. This usually happens when the feed doesn't provide a stable entry identifier that lets LJ or DW tell an edited entry from anew one with same or similar content. In the absence of such a field, the synsucking task assumes it's a ew entry, hence the result you see. So, yes, it's ugly, but I'm reluctant to blame it on the LJ/DW side. More to the point, LJ and DW *do* provide a stable entry identifier, so what you see for that feed shouldn't happen (provided the feed aggregator on the other side is sane). It would see them as changed existing entries, not as new entries that just happen to have (nearly) the same content.

Also, crossposting isn't the same as importing feed content: if you crosspost an entry from DW to LJ, it's DW pushing entry content to LJ, whereas if you syndicate your DW journal to LJ (create a LJ feed of it), it's LJ that pulls (public) entries from DW, and the formats used to pass entries are different (syndication uses standard formats - RSS or Atom, whereas crossposting uses something ad-hoc, I believe). That is to say, it could well be that there is no such standard, but the automagic image hack doesn't prove it (it's the only way that applies to crossposting, but not or not necessarily for syndication).

[zvi]

When I said "which is why people have implemented the automagic image hack", I didn't mean, "which is why DW has implemented it in crossposting" but rather, "which is why big blogging software like Wordpress has implemented such a hack."

The fact that Wordpress doesn't have a better base solution is not absolute proof, but it's suggestive, is what I'm saying.

[pauamma]

Oh, OK. Never mind, then.