Comments on: What I Want: RSS -> Forum

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:59:38 +0000

It seems like this sort of functionality is more dependent upon the blog/news site than the reader. Some blogs let you subscribe to all postings on the site as well as all comments (I think these are the “Comments (RSS)” feeds you’ve seen). Others let you subscribe to comments on a particular post after you’ve read the original post, but generally you have to go to the page for that post: you can’t get to it from your reader’s version of the page.

And unfortunately LJ’s interaction with RSS remains severely limited.

By: Nick Novitski

Nick Novitski — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:21:57 +0000

You should try Google Waaaait that's not out yet, never mind. Okay, when it comes out, and is broadly adopted, and has a vibrant developer market with all kinds of import-export gadgets to connect to many normal blogs, then it may be just what we're looking for. Google Reader actually does everything you just said, with the severe that only people who you specifically invite are the members of your personal forum. So if I share a livejournal post, my friends can have a lively discussion, but we aren't notified when people post comments on whatever.livejournal.com. So it actually doesn't do what you said. Sorry.

By: Seth A. Roby

Seth A. Roby — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:28:41 +0000

Some blogs do have “all comments” feeds, which I suppose you could use to simplify matters, but it’d only work on blog systems that support it (not sure how many do) and make it autodiscoverable (probably most of them that do). So now every time you load your feed list you’re loading two feeds, which wouldn’t be too difficult. So theoretically you might be able to work it out.

Along this vein, take a look at Fever: http://feedafever.com/

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:05:49 +0000

Huh. So what are the “Comments (RSS)” links I see on WordPress blogs?

By: Seth A. Roby

Seth A. Roby — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:48:15 +0000

There’s a trend (slow at this point) toward centralized commenting systems like Disqus, which aggregate all the comments together so that you can get emails when new comments come in. Blogger does something similar. I’m not sure if either exposes the ‘new comments’ as a feed, though, and they’re useful only for those blogs that have adopted them.

But what you want isn’t currently available, and probably isn’t possible. RSS 2.0 feeds can have a section in each that points to the page for viewing the comments, but said page isn’t guaranteed to be in any format; it’s usually an HTML form where you can post a new comment and read what others have said, and not a machine-readable format (like RSS or Atom). So there’s not a way to auto-discover the comments per item.

Even if there was, each item has its own comments feed, so you’d have to make a HTTP GET per item, so the software would run about as fast as Prudence can.