Making WordPress.org

Opened 7 years ago

Last modified 12 months ago

#2204 accepted defect (bug)

Forum RSS Feed Issues

Reported by: dglingren's profile dglingren Owned by: sergeybiryukov's profile SergeyBiryukov
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Support Forums Keywords:
Cc:

Description

The RSS feeds generated by the new Plugin Directory platform have a number of drawbacks/defects compared to the feeds that were generated by the old platform.

  1. When a new reply is posted to a topic:
  • The email message generated for "subscribers" to the topic also has the correct information, but the message comes as plain-text so markup for code blocks, lists, etc. is lost.
  1. When the original post in a topic was modified, the feed generates and ongoing stream of "updates" identical to the original except for the "This topic was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by ..." text. This makes it hard to identify topics with genuine updates.
  1. When updates are posted to old topics (e.g. started 8 months ago), no RSS feed update is generated. It is hard to know when new activity occurs in an old topic.

Minor notes:

  1. The subject line no longer includes the plugin name, which makes it harder to organize an archive by plugin.
  1. The subject line no longer includes the post author, which would be fine if the actual author value was set correctly.
  1. The subject line now identifies "[Resolved]" topics, but not any other status value.

In short, RSS updates should contain:

  • The actual text of the update, with HTML markup
  • The actual date/time of the update
  • The actual author of the update
  • A subject line that includes the plugin name and perhaps the current status in addition to the topic title.

Change History (13)

#1 @samuelsidler
7 years ago

  • Component changed from General to Support Forums

#2 @dglingren
7 years ago

It looks like no RSS updates are issued for any topic older than about 30-45 days. I just posted updates to a number of topic announcing a new plugin release. None of the older topics generated RSS updates, but all of them are moved to the top of the "Active Topics" view (https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/media-library-assistant/active).

This makes it very hard to rely on RSS updates to monitor support forum activity.

#3 @wfasa
7 years ago

Just wanted to add here that the RSS feed of those topics only contain the latest post when it should contain the latest 10 posts. Example:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lazy-load-and-masonry-layout/feed

#4 @dglingren
7 years ago

The latest update to the support forums has made the RSS issues worse. Some updates do not appear to generate an RSS update. When an RS update does occur it overwrites the previous update.

So, for example, if three new posts are made to a topic:

The old platform (before the big conversion) would generate three separate RSS updates, each containing the content of the new update in the forum.

The new platform before the latest update would generate three separate RSS updates, each containing a redundant copy of the first post in the topic (not the new material). The only difference was that the "Replies" count would be incremented in each new RSS update.

The current platform generates just one RSS update with the Replies count jumping to the highest value.

Can anyone say when these RSS issues might get some attention?

#5 @dglingren
7 years ago

Following a new release of my plugin I posted new replies to ten support forum topics. None of these posts generated an RSS Feed update.

Today an MLA user posted an update to a topic opened two months ago. Again, no RSS Update, although I did get an email update because I've subscribed to the plugin.

It seems reasonable that any updates to a topic in the "Active Topics" view should generate an RSS update, as they did on the old platform.

#7 @SergeyBiryukov
7 years ago

  • Owner set to SergeyBiryukov
  • Status changed from new to accepted

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by clorith. View the logs.


6 years ago

#9 @dd32
4 years ago

Just noting that several things here have been fixed.

When updates are posted to old topics (e.g. started 8 months ago), no RSS feed update is generated. It is hard to know when new activity occurs in an old topic.

and

Just wanted to add here that the RSS feed of those topics only contain the latest post when it should contain the latest 10 posts. Example:

Via #2048.

The subject line no longer includes the plugin name, which makes it harder to organize an archive by plugin.

This was fixed for Emails, but not RSS.

The subject line no longer includes the post author, which would be fine if the actual author value was set correctly.

The Author fields are set correctly, I don't think it should be included in the title.

Most of the rest of this thread appear to be bbPress things that are mostly not going to be fixed specifically for WordPress.org, but need to be reported upstream to bbpress.trac.wordpress.org as individual issues to better improve RSS for everyone.

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by clorith. View the logs.


3 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by vladytimy. View the logs.


13 months ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by thelmachido. View the logs.


12 months ago

#13 @mrfoxtalbot
12 months ago

A subject line that includes the plugin name and perhaps the current status in addition to the topic title.

Big +1 to this. Trying to handle/automate multiple forums without a clear indication of where the come from is a challenge.

If we move forward with these changes, let's take into account this related ticket #4867

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