Mark at WTC got me thinking about comment forms inside RSS feeds. I think there might be a more complete solution to his thoughts and to some ideas I had been having about the difficulty of following discussions in the comments of RSS-aggregated sites.
One thing I really dislike about feeds is having to subscribe to a feed for every post where I leave a comment. I can understand it if it’s the only post I ever intend to leave at a place, but it might be handy to track more than one post’s comments without subscribing to individual post comment feeds – especially for sites that already have their main post feed listed in my aggregator. How difficult would it be to eliminate some of the tedium from this process?
WordPress provides a mechanism for publishing the URL of the comment feed, but as far as I am aware, no feed reader supports reading this tag, nor does the tag itself offer a way for the feed to notify the user of evolving discussions. For example, it might be nice to see how many comments there are on a post before choosing to subscribe to the comment feed.
Here is my elaborate plan for change:
Every time your blog is presented, a unique, unused URL is produced that links to your newsfeed. A user adds this URL to his newsreader. It might look something like this: http://asymptomatic.net/wp/feed/ringmaster
Included with each post is a bug for “learn more” or “follow discussion” or “add to the discussion”. I envision these bugs as a kind of micro-toolbar at the bottom of each post. Using this link or form adds a flag to that user’s special feed URL on the publishing server that connects him to the selected discussion.
Subsequent fetches of his unique feed URL will return not only new posts, but new comments (including his, if he left one) on the selected posts. Comment items would have a bug that allows a user to add a new comment to the thread or to detach the discussion from his feed.
It might also be possible to add bugs that detach certain categories from the feed, but leave the rest intact. For example, I have a particular feed that I read whose video game and operating system posts are timely, but mostly lost amongst his political rants which are quite contrary to my own beliefs. Rather than sift through every political post to find that nugget of gold, I could click a single button in my feed output that would allow me to kill that whole category of posts in my personal feed output from his site.
Whether these feeds would only be offered to registered users, I don’t know. It would certainly be nice to offer them to anyone who pulled the feed, although it would certainly be easier to generate user-unique URLs using the username of the currently logged-in user. Coupled with WordPress 1.6’s usermeta table, this could be very easily implemented without adding extra tables to the database. (Anyone implementing this feature for WP1.5 should use a similar structure for storage to maintain forward compatibility.)
Would registered users who leave comments on the site directly have that thread automatically added to their feed output? That could save some steps.
Perhaps a special prefix character could differentiate randomly generated feed URLs from not. The feed URL for an unregistered user might look like: http://asymptomatic.net/wp/feed/%20a8bc3d
Some kind of management page on the site itself might also be handy. This page would allow a user to suspend certain comment threads from their feed, manage the categories to which they are subscribed, and perhaps even enter keywords for filtering posts for their custom feed.
And then the down side. If everyone has a custom feed, then no feeds would be cached. A crafty coder could figure out how to cache a few things, but it would probably not be as efficient as the simple post-only or comments-on-one-post-only feeds that are currently available.
I really think that feeds are an area that could be expanded. Rather than worrying about stepping on the toes of theorists with huge audiences who merely cast their spew onto the masses via a one-way feed, perhaps we grubs down in the ditches could start to contribute toward policy in a way that helps us foster community – something that feeds don’t really provide.
