How-To Geek Forums / Site Suggestions
HTG RSS feed not providing all articles.
(6 posts)
There's too many scammers taking the contents of our feed and republishing on other sites, which is frustrating to have to deal with all the time.
Secondly, it's not really that difficult to come to the site and read the article.
We might provide full feeds again at some point in the future.
I have subscriptions to hundreds of feeds. If I had to navigate to each site it would be impossible to keep up. Google Reader makes it possible for me to get through large amounts of info and it's infuriating to have feeds like the one on this site.
IMO a site either does a RSS feed or it doesn't. It makes no sense to to do it half way. The feed is not complete and the subscriber will have to come to the site anyway to see all the content so there is no point to a feed with partial content. The same with sites that just provide a small sample of the article and then require you to come to the site to see the full article. Makes no sense and defeats the purpose of an RSS feed. Sites that do these things should just drop the feed all together.
The other problem that I didn't mention is bandwidth, which is a huge concern for a site like ours that's doing something like 8 TB of bandwidth a month, which isn't free. Full RSS feeds make that problem much, much worse.
There's loads of really great, premier sites that do partial feeds, like ArsTechnica, Slashdot, Gawker, ZDNet, etc. In fact, very few of the largest sites do full feeds—clearly it's a pretty accepted practice.
In any case, I'm not arguing about it. The one thing I've learned is that people whine no matter what decision I make... In fact, I used to get about 1 email every month from somebody asking for an excerpt feed instead.
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