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Is there a RSSlike standard for Posting? What about NNTP?
So often when I'm reading a blog or news site (Such as news.yc) in my feedreader, I wish I could easily read the full set of comments, or easily hit reply, and leave a comment right on the site.
I understand that the preferred model is to then "push" my reply to my own site, but it seems easier for everyone if there were a standardized API that could be used to posting replies to the site.
I'd also love to be able to read the various comments, fully thread them, and the like.. The Natural solution that comes to me is integrating a NNTP-like service into the popular website hosting software.. NNTP has allowed people to post replies and read through those of others easily for decades. It supports moderated on non-moderated posting, and it's lightweight enough to be supported everywhere.
Are there any other solutions that are in the works? Perhaps a simpler API that's based on HTTP post, rather than Sockets?
One of the main advantages of NNTP, is that it already has a HUGE base of Client Support- People have NNTP readers and don't even realize it.. Outlook, Thunderbird, Etc. What other app gets a huge installed base of users, who don't even realize they already have that functionality? ;)
I can understand reasoning that says that Spam might be a problem, but I have a hard time agreeing with it..
For one, there's technological fixes, such as HashCash, or even server-side IP filters.. Keep in mind, since each post goes back to the original server, who is running their OWN instance of NNTP, they can blacklist however they choose.
It seems like there's certainly an opportunity for this sort of development, I'm just curious if anyone knows someone working on it.
Unfortunately, I'm too busy approaching beta on Chron X to take on any new projects, but it seems like something desperately needed, and not a difficult technological problem.
- hassy 19y agoThere's AtomPub -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)
- engtech 19y agoYup. It's AtomPub. Look up Sam Ruby for more info on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Ruby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Ruby
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- e1ven 19y agoThanks, I hadn't seen that before. Shame on me. It still has the downside of not having the same level of client-support that NNTP does, but given that it doesn't require server support, I can see the appeal. There's a couple of things in the Atom spec that seems underutilized, such as AtomPub. When combined with the threading, that could be a viable alternative. I wonder why So few sites support it? Momentum? If I had the spare time (or capital to hire someone else), I'd love to see plugins added for the popular Blog packages and forums. I suppose I shall have to wait and see.
- wmf 19y agoThere are extensions for RSS/Atom that allow threaded comment feeds; if you combine this with the feed reading support in Thunderbird it might almost get you a news-like reading experience. Probably the biggest challenge would be getting blogs to output threaded feeds. A standard protocol for posting comments on blogs sounds like it would be politically difficult due to fear of comment spam (it doesn't matter whether that fear is justified). Technically I think you could use unathenticated AtomPub, but I don't know if anyone has implemented this use case. As for NNTP, you can't serve it from a $7 Dreamhost account so obviously it sucks.
- abarrera 19y agoI wrote about this same issue some time ago. You can read it here http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/idea-embedding-rss-comments-in-a-content-rss-feed/ http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/idea-embed....
- nicolas17 18y agoThere's SIOC for read-only access to forums.