add the poster information to community rss feeds

[ratcreature]

Title:
add the poster information to community rss feeds

Area:
communities, rss

Summary:
When I read a feed of a community I would like to be able to see the user who posted as well as the community name. It seems that this info is not in the RSS feed, and I guess DW can't do anything to make it appear in the LJ feeds, but it doesn't seem to be included in the community feeds originating on DW either, and I think it should be, so people reading communities offsite could see the posters.

Description:
In other feeds from blogs I've sometimes seen a "posted by" line, and in addition to the feed name I don't know whether that is a formal field in the format, but something like that would be nice to have in community feeds, so that readers could tell the poster.

Currently community feeds are for me more like alerts, because I always have to click to see who the poster was, even if I don't want to comment. So I suppose a drawback might be that people like me who like to know the poster are less likely to click to the original feed to find out, but communities concerned about their traffic can change the feed setting to just a teaser blurb or summary iirc, so that would be more straightforward to attract clicks, and otherwise I can't think of anything negative to come from this.

Poll #6470 add the poster information to community rss feeds

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
31 (67.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (2.2%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (28.3%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.2%)

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

I don't understand what behaviour you are looking for here. Do you mean for the feed from a blog which has multiple contributors or do you mean the person who set the feed up on Dreamwidth?

[ratcreature]

I mean the poster in a community being shown in the feed of a community. Like I mod a community here on DW, called fanart_recs. Someone (not me) set up a feed for that community on LJ at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/fanart_recs/, because people like to follow the recs there, but they cannot see who posted the recs, they just see the community name, fanart_recs as poster, not "susiefangirl in fanart_recs" as it is with communities you follow locally. I want that the feeds from communities provided by DW include the susiefangirl name in addition to the comm name.

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks for explaining. I get it now.

[matgb]

When DW reads a feed from a blog with multiple creators, the poster of each post can be displayed as it's included in the feed.

A community is effectively a blog with multiple creators, but we don't use the same RSS standards to insert the poster name into the feed.

We should.

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks

[turlough]

But isn't this already the case? If you check bandslashmania_feed for example the poster's name is at the top of each entry.

[denise]

I'm pretty sure ratcreature is talking about adding in that information to the feeds that we publish, so the information will be there when sie reads DW community feeds in an outside feedreader!

[turlough]

Ah, I see. *changes vote*

[ratcreature]

Yes. I want that people who for example follow a feed from a DW community on LJ may see not just the comm name but the poster name. I would love it if feeds I read from LJ here on DW were to show that too, but I assume DW can't do anything about how LJ comms format their feeds.
ETA: actually it seems that in feeds from LJ this now appears after all (is this new? I remember submitting this suggestion because I was annoyed about a feed from LJ here on my DW reading list, and then saw that feeds from here didn't show a poster either...)

[pauamma]

But as far as I can tell, that information is already there.Looking at the RSS feed for dw_suggestions (http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/data/rss) I see the following in the data for this entry:

<lj:poster>ratcreature</lj:poster>

and for the Atom feed (http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/data/atom):

<author>

<name>RatCreature</name>

</author>
<dw:poster user="ratcreature"/>

Perhaps the problem is in what the recipient site expects, not (or not only) what Dreamwidth provides?

[azurelunatic]

I think I remember seeing this in a recent code tour, actually. So it may be newly implemented.

[sophie]

The Atom feed has this information if you can use that! As you say, the RSS feed doesn't, but on the other hand, RSS is incompatible with itself because there are so many ways to interpret it.

I haven't checked, but it's possible that RSS may not even have a way to show the poster. In any case, Atom is far better if you can use it. :)

[edit: Actually, I was wrong; both the RSS and Atom feeds have this information. However, they're both implemented using custom tags which readers would need to recognise in order to show them; the RSS feed uses <lj:poster> while the Atom feed uses <dw:poster>. (I guess that means we need to update the RSS one, heh.)

So we already have the information. Does anybody know of the tags we should be using for this?]

[pauamma]

I think the answer is "whatever the recipient site understands" (since there is no standard field for "username".

[dragonfly]

I would really love to have this. It bothers me when I get ficlists via a feed and can't see who posted the story.

[ratcreature]

Yeah me too. I have no idea why it can't be seen when, as others have said here, the feed does contain the poster info after all, but this surely something technical could be done that the poster info is recognized between DW and LJ.

[kareila]

This has already been implemented on DW, both putting the info into our feeds (both RSS & Atom) and reading the info included in LJ feeds. The problem is that LJ hasn't implemented the second part of that: they don't look for the author info that is published in feeds when displaying them on their site. They do include the poster info in their feeds, which is why we are able to display it here.

If their implementation ever changes in a way that our current code doesn't support, we can revisit how this information is published on our end. But it IS there, and LJ just isn't showing it to you in their interface.

So... to get what you want, changes have to be made on LJ's end. Good luck with that.