Slashdot Mirror
Best Practice For Retiring RSS Feeds?
GBJ writes "I work for an organisation that runs seasonal online competition events. Each event has its own news feed which becomes obsolete shortly after the event finishes. We're still getting RSS requests for some events as far back as 2004. I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause, but I'm not sure what is the best approach. Currently I'm considering just returning a 404, but I have no idea if there is a better way to handle this. Uncle Google hasn't turned anything up yet, but sometimes it's hard to find something when you don't know what it's called ..."
You should be able to do a 301 redirect to maybe some generic feed that just has one entry that says "This feed is out of date, please use try these feeds instead." Or whatever you want to let them know.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The most appreciative thing you could do for the preservation of history is to place static simple RSS files at those addresses that include a link to your archives for the event.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
HTTP 410 is better than HTTP 404 in this case; Uncle Google and the like have a better understanding of what it means.
If you have a version of the feed that covers the whole event from start to finish, you might also want to offer a static version of that for download as an archive (but if you do this, put it on a different URL from where the feed used to be). This isn't strictly necessary, but I can see scenarios where people might appreciate being able to get at the feed's contents again.
Are there more than one contest going at once, that there's a need for multiple feeds? Or, more appropriately, can some of this content not be removed completely? Keeping a full feed archive seems a bit of overkill, especially for closed events from five years ago. Why not PDF the event archive for downloading and keep a single feed for active items? Overpreparation is a growing problem I'm seeing on the web. Far too few people/events/businesses are prepared to minimize anything for the sake of optimization.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
He mentioned a couple of thousand old feeds. Either he's been serving feeds since the days when RSS was chiseled by hand into stone tablets, or he has distinct feeds which run concurrently - in which case reusing isn't going to work.
This seems like more of an opportunity than a problem. People haven't deleted the feed, so they obviously still want to hear from you. Redirect requests to the 'dead' feeds to a general feed that announces new events.
Dumping them with a 410 is a great way to loose your traffic.
I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause...
This seems like the way to go. Assuming that your website drives revenue somehow, throwing away traffic is not smart.
Anyone who runs a website would be extremely short-sided to discourage traffic in any way. What I'd do is create a new, more generic, news feed and redirect all the other feeds to it. The few people who simply forgot they were subscribed to the 2004 feed will either realize their mistake and drop off, or be still interested in your new events and stay on. If you just make the feeds disappear, those users disappear as well.
Despite what the summary says, I severely doubt that hits on old feeds are any kind of huge traffic drain. If it *truly* is, you could also redirect them to FeedBurner, save the traffic, and possibly monetize them at the same time.
Comment of the year
Forward them to a page listings current feeds, possibly with custom tailored advertisement-style links to events or other websites in your network.
Never waste traffic. At the end of the day, traffic is KING.
This is Slashdot, and I guess some here view the world in some kind of mechanical way free from the constraints of the real world. So yeah, if he wants to tell them to fuck off and feed their newsreader streaming crap from /dev/urandom, by all means do so. But that is a child's thing to do. Adults view the world different.
A mature adult would see that the cost of bandwidth is minimal and the untapped potential in all those people sitting on ancient feeds outweigh the potential costs. A mature adult who strives to have a successful website would find a way to tap that potential, possibly by redirecting the feed to something that nudges them to the good stuff.
But no, go ahead and stream your fucking mp3s to their newsreader. That will teach them to ever cross path your mad skillz. It will teach them so good they'll never visit your site again, never click your ads and never buy your services. Who needs their money, right? After all, rent is cheap living in the basement!
(ps: booya)