Comments RSS?

March 4, 2009 1:41 PM

Comments RSS?

I haven't been able to find it, is there a rss feed for a specific users comments across all sites?

posted by DJWeezy to Feature Requests at 1:41 PM (19 comments total)

No, there's no feed of a specific user's comments across the sites. We do have feeds for posts at each individual site, and you can find those on profile pages in the middle column under "contributions". Look for the orange feed icon.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:05 PM on March 4, 2009

Yes I see those but I'm trying to get a feed that includes my comments as well.
posted by DJWeezy at 2:23 PM on March 4, 2009

Nope, we don't have that.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:23 PM on March 4, 2009

Can we?
posted by DJWeezy at 2:27 PM on March 4, 2009

We've had a tradition on the site of trying to keep comments in the context of the thread in which they appear. We break that rule on the Popular Favorites page and on user activity pages, but we do try to keep context in mind in making decisions. By giving out a feed of a user's comments, we're granting explicit permission to break that rule and show comments completely out of the thread on some other website.

For some purposes, this would be fine. Especially if you're simply taking your own contributions and showing them on your personal website. But because feeds are public by nature, we can't control whether it's you or someone else using it. And showing someone else's comment contributions to MetaFilter outside of the thread in which they appear is problematic.

So I'm in the no camp on this one, but that's just my gut opinion.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:34 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'd like this as well. Not so much so I could syndicate the material, but so I could push it to friendfeed as a link:

"chrisamiller made a comment in thread Foo"
"chrisamiller had a best answer in response to question Bar"
posted by chrisamiller at 2:51 PM on March 4, 2009

Ya I agree with chrisamiller, that basically what I want it for. Though I can see where pb (and presumably the other admins) is coming from as well.
posted by DJWeezy at 2:57 PM on March 4, 2009

Yeah, an activity feed is a slightly different beast because it links to any content in its original context. It's something we've kicked around before, but I know I haven't thought through all of the privacy implications. We have the user activity sidebar and page and it sounds like that's similar to what you want for each single user (instead of all your contacts). Seems fine to keep tabs on your contacts on the site because who is following who is all public info, but I'm not sure how I feel about my site activity being watched out in the wild by who knows who. I don't think it's off the table, but I'd like to think carefully before making something like that available.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:06 PM on March 4, 2009

Wait, you want it so that other people can follow your activity on metafilte? Can't they do that on, y'know, metafilter?
posted by dersins at 3:07 PM on March 4, 2009

Follow? FOLLOW?! *looks around frantically* I just got off of Twitter because there were people following me, and now you're telling me they might follow me here, too?!? It's all because I know about the Grays, the ones altering the Earth's atmosphere to mutate us, the scientists say that it was bomb testing but I know the truth, and it's no coincidence that the unit of absorbed radiation is the Gray and I just noticed the colour of the site ohgod ohgod ohgo—
posted by adipocere at 3:17 PM on March 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

adipocere, hey, I've been looking for you!
posted by Meatbomb at 3:37 PM on March 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

This is probably is overkill but, what about requesting authorization from the user before generating a random address for accessing the activity RSS?

That way, members would have access only to their own RSS and no one else's, and if someone chooses to make their address public, well, that's their problem.

Sure, it's security through obscurity but if the address is long enough it would take ages to discover a member activity rss address, if they have generated it at all.
posted by Memo at 3:48 PM on March 4, 2009

My fans, peeps, and followers have all been requesting this since finishing the construction of my shrine.

I approve.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:27 PM on March 4, 2009

This is probably is overkill but, what about requesting authorization from the user before generating a random address for accessing the activity RSS?

Yes, this makes sense. It's the same way that Google handles public calendar sharing You have to enable it in your preferences, then google gives you a super-seekrit URL where you can access your feed without any authorization.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:23 PM on March 4, 2009

Couldn't you make it so the user can generate a new random rss url? Then even if someone chooses to make it public and changes their mind, they can simply make it 'unpublic' by regenerating the feed.
posted by jacalata at 6:39 PM on March 4, 2009

(gently) scraping my mefi 'favorites' page for the sole purpose of sharing stuff from here, on FriendFeed.
posted by mnology at 7:43 PM on March 4, 2009

It seems like a lot of work for minimal functionality, doesn't it? I mean, if you want other people to see your MeFi contributions, link them. If they can't be bothered to folow up with it, why would they care about an out-of-context link on some other newsfeed?
posted by Phire at 8:17 PM on March 4, 2009

I was asking for something like this before. What I would like to see is a feed of my personally favourited FPPs.
For example, you can add your "dugg" posts from digg to any feed collector or reader, which is really convenient, but I seldom like digg posts enough to do that. Metafilter on the other hand often has some good posts that I'd like to add to my soup.io...
posted by kolophon at 9:14 AM on March 5, 2009

Sure, I don't see a problem with favorite posts. Just added that feed here:

http://www.metafilter.com/favorites/[user id]/posts/rss

I also added a "subscribe" link on the favorites page under the headline so it's easy to find. Here's my favorite posts if you want to see the link in action.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:24 PM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]