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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 ..."
Retiring feeds
A phase-out needs.
As facial bristles,
Or torn skin bleeds.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You should be able to do a 301 redirect to maybe some generic feed that just has one entry that says "This feed is out of date, please use try these feeds instead."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
RFC 2616 is the one to read. It specifies a "410 Gone" for resources that are gone for good.
Gone
Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed; however, it is not necessary to return this code and a 404 Not Found can be issued instead. Upon receiving a 410 status code, the client should not request the resource again in the future. Clients such as search engines should remove the resource from their indexes.
use a 410 Gone more informative than 404
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.11
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
The resource isn't "Not Found", it's "Gone". HTTP 404 is inappropriate in this instance.
Likely the best solution will be to ensure that people are notified first. If you're receiving a large number of hits, replace the content with a single RSS item that has a guaranteed-unique guid for every single request (say, based on the request time). This way, with each request, people will receive a "new" item that will display as unread, reminding them to unsubscribe from that particular feed.
After some amount of time, start returning HTTP 410 for all requests.
My company has had the same issue. We just wrote out a single item feed that explained that the feed had been discontinued and provided a link to the homepage. We wrote this feed over all the feeds to be taken down.
Interestingly, in the weeks following this action, our homepage views spiked followed shortly after by increased hits on more active feeds.
Yes. Because if the newsreader flakes out, the *person behind the computer* might blame you and never subscribe to your feed again. We are dealing with people here, not machines. Were are not here to seek spite on stupid newsreaders or "lusers who dont unsubscribe". This is business. Petty bullshit only wastes time and loses money.
Even if the newsreader was well behaved and did the right thing, you've just stupidly removed your brand from being thrown in their face every time they opened their reader. If you've got like 10,000 subscribers sitting on a bunch of year-old feeds and you cruelly dump them with a 410/404, that is lost mindshare and lost traffic.
The best solutions are the ones that encourage feed users to keep using your services by nudging them to your new stuff.
Bottom line is, it is easier to keep existing customers than it is to get new ones. Think about it.