Scienceblogs RSS and other dilemas

The kinks continue to get ironed out one by one after our massive migration. Most of the major problems are happening on the backend, and are likely invisible to you guys (except for the fact that some typically prolific posters have slowed down a bit), but there are a couple of things that I've noticed that probably will affect you.

The biggest one is the RSS feeds, and specifically the "select" feed. If you usually use RSS to keep up to date on the blogs here, your old links are probably broken (at least, all of the one I had were). If you look at the right sidebar, there's a link to a new RSS feed on every blog, and those appear to be working fine. The select feed, on the other hand, remains broken. Our new interface doesn't have any mechanism to flag posts for the select feed anymore, and I couldn't tell you what the new feed url would be anyway. We're told they're working on it.

Another thing that might affect you in a roundabout way is the high levels of spam. The filters that had been built up over the years at moveable type seem to be gone, and it's a bit out of hand. I'm getting 15-20 spam comments per day, and I'm one of the lower traffic blogs. This is mostly a pain for us, but you might notice that it will take a bit longer for comments to get approved. The good new is, once you comment on someone's blog and they approve it, you should be automatically approved for future posts. I've started to close comments on older posts that are attracting the most spam - you might notice other bloggers doing the same.

Finally, you were promised threaded comments (the ability to reply directly to other comments), and that's not live yet, though supposedly it's coming.

So far, the web team has been incredibly responsive to our issues, and have fixed them pretty fast. Like I said, there are still a bunch of things that are higher priority on the backend, so it may take a while for these things to get sorted, but I'm sure it will happen sooner rather than later.

If you pick up on anything else problematic or that doesn't seem right, please let me know and I'll pass it up the chain.

More like this

Not just Select feed, but also Combined feed. For example, links at Scienceblogging.org do not work. Homepage also does not seem to show the newest posts, so how does one discover the newest posts on the network as a whole? Will Last24H page come back?

Also, I see that every single blog that was ever on the network is back on the Menu up right - including my own. I also keep getting Spam comment email notifications about 20 times per day, and, weirdest of all - I am able to log in and send them into spam folder. I bet if I wanted to, I could publish new posts and those would be visible in various places and feeds....

@ Coturnix - We’ve been told last 24 hours, the combined feed and the select feed will all be coming back… someday. We’ve also been told that they’re working on identifying and inactivating legacy blogs, but I bet you’re right that you could start posting again (if you wanted to).

If you can access your dashboard, chances are you can disable the setting that sends you e-mails with new comments (and they’ll just all be held in moderation). Or, there’s an option that says “close comments on posts older than X days” that you might be able to make use of.

A little bird told me the Combined feed will be fixed on Monday.

By John Silver (not verified) on 31 May 2012 #permalink

Well, that's exciting. Did this bird mention anything about select feed and our individual blog feeds?

I didn't notice the absence of this blog on my google reader feeder due to the huge amount of post that I read every morning. Many blogs are using a kind of facebook login so that you can chose to share or not a comment and a page directly from here.

Keep the wonderful work

Thanks

By Rafael Science (not verified) on 01 Jun 2012 #permalink

I figured a lot of people would be in the same boat as you (especially since I hadn't been posting much leading up to the transition). In glad you found your way back.

Select feed seems to be completely gone.

By Andrew Gillett (not verified) on 04 Jul 2012 #permalink