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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 ..."
Use a "disposable" DNS record e.g. eventname.rss.domain.com
When time comes to bin the feed you can either alter the record to a server that just serves 404's or remove the DNS entry completely. Useful for feeds getting lots of hits/second as removing the record drops all the useless traffic from your site.
You've got one feed for updates in each sport or event.
Imagine horse racing. You are making updates to racing scores throughout the day. Gamblers are monitoring each race. How would you structure this king of thing? One feed per day? One per season?
What about comments? You've got a feed per thread/story. When the story is closed for comments, what do you do with the feed?
What about auctions? You've got an auction and every bid triggers a new entry on your RSS feed. When the auction is over, what do you do with the feed?