I agree, can we not just take a hard line on non-val feeds and reject out of hand, skip the notes, fixer etc concept? It's seems we're doing the button pushing for people who should be wearing long enough pants to do that for themselves? m ----- Original Message ----- From: Hauckes To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:33 PM Subject: Re: [syndic8] Has the syndic8 concept been overwhelmed?
I agree with you regarding seeing so many bad feeds. Also, are there any people that speak all the other languages I see so much of? See ya, J. My Blog http://mcbsconsulting.blogspot.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Lutz Schroeer To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:24 AM Subject: [syndic8] Has the syndic8 concept been overwhelmed? The concept of "user reviewed feeds" was established in 2001 by Jeff. In 2002 he wrote a press release: "Syndic8 Creates Directory of Over 4500 Syndicated News Sources" I did like this concept and joined syndic8 as a reviewer. In the beginning there were about 1000 feeds in the reviewing queue. But the number of feeds and the size of queue have grown constantly: * active feeds: 101,572 * feeds ready for review: 245,397 Why there are so many feed that need reviewing? Aren't there enough reviewers? Is the interface too cumbersome? Is the process of reviewing too frustrating? Are there any other system immanent problems? I don't know how many active reviewers there are (but it would interest me), but I do know that I have to answer two questions with "Yes". I already wrote my opinion about the interface (http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/message/5254). But the frustrating part of reviewing is getting more and more into my view. Today I tried to review about 7 feed. The first 3 weren't reachable ("404" or "-2, 'Name or service not known'" from the validator) the next 4 gave me some basic XML warnings and errors. After that I *was* some kind of frustrated. Why do *I* as a human have to do this basic checking? Of course it's important that a human checks if the language is correct, if the content's not offensive or racist, and stuff like that. A machine would have some problems. But simply telling if a feed is available or not? If it's valid XML? This could be easily done by a machine. I think it's time to change to automated prechecking. For example, one feed (237301) was last parsed in June 2005. It's likely that it's dead. Another (399333) was last parsed at the end of July, another (373887) in the middle of September. Apparently all these feed are dead. We need to define some creteria which tell if a feed is broken or dead. For example: * the feed hasn't been parsed for 60 days =>dead * the feed has some severe XML errors =>invalid * the feed does almost contain no ASCII values in the items but claims to be in English language =>invalid * the feed does not contain any items at all (e.g. 364441) =>invalid * ... If one or more of these creterias are met the feed does not need to be presented to a human reviewer but should be marked dead, or an automatic mail should be written to the author telling him about the broken XML/RSS/Atom feed, or some other appropriate action should be performed. I still like the idea of syndic8 that feeds should be reviewed by humans, but I think syndic8 is overwhelmed by the number of new feeds. The prefiltering of feeds would eliminate a huge amount of definitely dead or bad feeds and give the reviewers time to check the feeds which are worth it. I think there's a need to rethink the concept of syndic8 in some parts. Times have changed, so should syndic8. 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