All posts in the topic forum2rss (Short link)
Summary
- There are 15 posts — by 5 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Walter Logeman at 2005 Oct 26 05:22 UTC
Hello,
This is my first post on this forum from a web page. I have already posted on
GroupServer Admin but I would like to spend some time here to discuss issues
directly related to the user interface.
At the moment I'm simply observing what's going on with collaboration software.
I have stopped myself from subscribing to any mailing list on this website
apart from GroupServer Admin. I don't know how your email system copes but my
email client is crawling along.
To be honest I don't really spend much time at all checking websites to find
out if there is new information, I just use RSS. While at new web pages I
normally just scan the page looking for keywords, before deciding if I should
read any of the text. The more text the less likely I will read it unless it's
a suject I'm passionate about.
I have subscribed to this RSS feed, but I'm not yet sure how it fully works. I
imagined that it would be like 1-way email, where I would receive the sames
messages that are available on the mailing list. It doesn't seem to work that
way, I seem to only be getting 1 message from every topic appearing in the RSS
feed.
Can I change how my RSS is delivered using a control panel, to allow *all*
messages from the mailing list into the feed?
Jim says:
"I have stopped myself from subscribing to any mailing list on this website
apart from GroupServer Admin."
Ok I just realised this is not true, since I needed to subscribe to this forum
in order to post. Would it be possible to post to a forum without having to
subscribe to the mailing list?
Jim says :
"I have subscribed to this RSS feed, but I'm not yet sure how it fully works.
I imagined that it would be like 1-way email, where I would receive the sames
messages that are available on the mailing list. It doesn't seem to work that
way, I seem to only be getting 1 message from every topic appearing in the RSS
feed."
I have just realised how this RSS feed works. It simply creates an entry for
every new topic with the latest message. This is OK ... partial feeds are OK as
well ... but the control panel for customising feeds would still be a nice
feature.
Quoting James Robertson <<email obscured>>: > > Jim says: > "I have stopped myself from subscribing to any mailing list on this website > apart from GroupServer Admin." > > Ok I just realised this is not true, since I needed to subscribe to this > forum in order to post. Would it be possible to post to a forum without > having to subscribe to the mailing list? Jim, this a new paradigm - you join an "online group" and set your delivery preferences - e-mail full text, topic digest, web-only ... while being part of the same group. You can change delivery settings in your setting in Your Profile (which should maybe be Your Settings). The problem we've faced is that 1/2 the people like web forums and 1/2 like e-lists and they seem to hate the other medium. With GroupServer we can get people in the same virtual space without offending their technology preferences. With full-text RSS, the problem I see as a host of groups in lots of excess bandwidth usage assuming that people would retrieve the same data repeated times. Just feeding the headlines with snippets by far use the most web bandwidth (although I don't how it compares to e-mail). You also can't post via RSS, so why not direct people to the web view where they can also post right then and there. Cheers, Steven Clift http://e-democracy.org
Jim: Taking each idea, one at a time: 1) Full text RSS feeds: As Steven has pointed out, this is a really inefficient way of delivering content. Caching helps, but effectively reading content is what an email client is designed for. One possibility for full text RSS feeds that I think _would_ be useful would be to deliver the last (say) 5/10 topics from _all_ groups that a user is subscribed to, since that would be a relatively lower amount of duplicate traffic (yes, reading on the web is also duplicate traffic, but you need to go there to reply if you're using RSS feeds anyway). 2) Posting when not subscribed: I like it, good idea. The person would clearly need to have an account (and thus, a verified email address), but otherwise I think it would work well. There are always spammer issues though (just look at comment spammers in blogs) so we'd probably need to enhance the posting box to use a 'Captcha' code (though given http://www.captcha.net is saying that computer vision projects are achieving 93% in their test, it might not be effective for much longer!). Best regards, Richard Waid http://iopen.net
Thanks for bringing your ideas and questions here, Jim,
Richard wrote:
> 1) Full text RSS feeds: As Steven has pointed out, this is a really
> inefficient way of delivering content. Caching helps, but effectively
> reading content is what an email client is designed for.
I don't think it's any more or less efficient for GroupServer groups
than it is for blogs. For me, it works really well for quickly surveying
what's going on, before deciding to look further into anything.
> One
> possibility for full text RSS feeds that I think _would_ be useful
> would be to deliver the last (say) 5/10 topics from _all_ groups that
> a user is subscribed to, since that would be a relatively lower
> amount of duplicate traffic
Again, that problem is not unique to GroupServer. What we are planning
in GroupServer is to provide the capability to aggregate multiple
RSS/Atom feeds and to render them in the GroupServer interface, as well
as publish them as new Atom feeds.
> 2) Posting when not subscribed: I like it, good idea. The person
> would clearly need to have an account (and thus, a verified email
> address), but otherwise I think it would work well.
I'm not sure I agree. What does it add over allowing people to join and
then post? It's pretty easy to join once you have your account. I think
it's important for group members to be able to see who is in the group
(ie on the Members page). It creates more of a sense of persistent
membership.
In any event, I thought (as Steve did) that Jim was looking for a way to
participate solely via the Web, without receiving email. As Steve says,
it's easy to do that with your "Email Settings".
Jim, have you tried the "topic digest" feature?
Yes! I am now participating solely via the web.
I would be interested to know how many RSS subscribers there are for the
Brighton & HOVE UK forum. Does anybody know? Less than 20 or more than 20?
RSS is still maturing as a technology, It will take years (I predict 2009)
before the average person understands how to use web feeds. The problem
organisations have with RSS is not primarily "efficiency", but how to make
money from it, that's why some offer partial RSS reeds.
I read recently that only 10% of people who read blogs regularly know what RSS
feeds are. If we used that analogy for this group (members count=13), that
means only 1 person would subscribe via RSS. Me ;) I would be interested to
know if Dan subscribes to RSS feeds.
Yes, Jim, I subscribe to a couple of dozen RSS feeds, mostly blogs but one or
two GroupServer groups and a flickr feed.
I don't know how we could measure how many people are using RSS on Brighton &
Hove or any GroupServer group.
Dan says: "I don't know how we could measure how many people are using RSS on Brighton & Hove or any GroupServer group." This is a problem. It's important to apply metrics when measuring success. I'm sure the UK government will measure the success of e-Democracy by the increase of voters on Polling day. However it helps to be able to see where the achievements have been made and how. It doesn't require a lot of work, periodic sampling would be sufficient. I suggest that each member is given a unique identifier e.g. 157574, when the user initially wishes to subscribe to an RSS feed they click on the hyperlink. This hyperlink will contain the unique identifier e.g. http://groupserver.org/groups/demo/messages/view_thread_rss?id=157574 Whenever the user's RSS reader requests the latest RSS feed from the web server it contains the user's id. The web server will then be set to log all RSS feed requests, probably in a daily log file. The GroupServer administrator would run a script, possibly on a monthly basis which reads the Web server log file containing the RSS feed requests for the previous month. The script would then parse the id's for a particular URL, to identify who is using RSS feeds and how often. The results could then be stored in a spreadsheet, which would then generate statistics eg. a bar graph to show the no of RSS feed requests per user, per month. This feature does add value to the system, and it would help indicate how GroupServer forums were being used. If you knew ie. the GroupServer site had been gaining a lot more hits over the past 1 month you would be in a better position to find out why and how it could be solved. Best wishes, Jim Robertson
Steven Clift says:
<quote>
With full-text RSS, the problem I see as a host of groups in lots of excess
bandwidth usage assuming that people would retrieve the same data repeated
times. Just feeding the headlines with snippets by far use the most web
bandwidth (although I don't how it compares to e-mail). You also can't post via
RSS, so why not direct people to the web view where they can also post right
then and there.
</quote>
All I know is I want something as good if not better than email, including all
the benefits of a web forum. RSS for me is part of the solution, as Dan says
it's handy for quickly surveying what's going on.
I remember when Microsoft's aggregated blogs (blogs.msdn.com) first appeared in
RSS, they offered full content posts. Then after a while the people responsible
for providing the feed had the bright idea of truncating all posts. It was
amusing to read the protests they got from bloggers and readers for that one.
:) A few days later all blogs were returned to their normal state.
I rarely comment on MSDN blogs or Sun blogs (blogs.sun.com), but I find being
able to use my RSS reader to browse through posts at speed very efficient using
just the arrow keys on my keyboard.
I suggest publicly displaying the email address should be made optional.
I have found someone who was previously a member of the Brighton & Hove, UK
forum who has had problems with having their email exposed on the mail list.
Read more here...
<snip>
Since contacting your organisation and forwarding a letter i wrote to the local
papers on the Gehry designs, I have been bombarded with emails from other forum
members. This is getting daft-at least 6 a day.
can you take me off of your forum circulation list and I will keep in contact
via my dad.
</snip>
I was going to post a fictitious case study on this very problem, but I decided
against it since it didn't seem to have been problem, until now. I sometimes
wonder how politicians who publish their email address cope? Possibly it hasn't
been a problem before, but I expect these kind of issues will manifest
themselves until measures are put in place.
As you know I see RSS in the future being a replacement to email for group
discussions. It's a shame there still isn't any decent RSS readers available
unless you are willing to build your own. Saying that I just googled for "rss
ajax reader" and I found backbase.com, which looks like the most promising RSS
reader I have seen so far. I might just have to blog about this.
Actually, this is a case where the person didn't understand the very nature of
a joining an online group with default e-mail delivery.
We do need to make it more obvious how one changes their settings to digest
and web-only for one or many groups at the same time.
One e-mail exposurer issue is that e-mails embedded in the text could be
further obscured and replaced with links to the member page of known e-mails.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
How do I find the RSS url for this group?
Walter
Walter, > How do I find the RSS url for this group? It's on the home page for the group at http://groupserver.org/groups/exploring.
Dan, All, >>How do I find the RSS url for this group? > > > It's on the home page for the group at > http://groupserver.org/groups/exploring. Got it. RSS orange box? I'd see that! The orange indicator, bottom right in Firefox, is not showing up. I wonder why? Good to be subbed now, that will be my preferred mode of access I think.