Update about our RSS feeds
Shiny informed me there were some dicussions about our RSS feeds lately. I was going to make this post a few days ago but I somehow forgot to finalize it, so here it is. The thing is I changed the form of our RSS feeds from complete articles to summary text. This means you won’t see a full post in the RSS feed, but rather a first few sentences of each page here at Releaselog. Many of you probably think like WTF, why did you do this to us Martin, but there are very clear and simple reasons. I’ve noticed at least 5 different websites which were stealing our complete articles through these full RSS feeds and publishing them on their sites like it was their job. No credits, no backlink, nothing. And this was probably only the beggining, I haven’t searched for it too much. I simply can’t accept this, so I made this change as a precaution to this behavior, and although it may upset some of you, I firmly believe it’s not that big pain or problem and it will prevent another websites from stealing our content without permission.
Oh and by the way, you could also notice we moved our RSS feed to Feedburner which offers some special features for administration. One of them is a detail statistics, which informed me there are about 5000 readers who visit our RSS feed on daily basis. The most popular RSS agregator is Google Feedfetcher followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks and Netvibes.
Yes, rlslog deserves the best. The other sites who steal our stuff are just ignorant and immature.
RSS feeds are a great way to selectively receive information on just the topics you want. I wish there was a way to customize the site in the same way. ex: just get info on new movie and music releases .. but not tv shows or applications. that would be great … then you could quickly visit the site and just see what you want … as full articles … similar to what many of us we getting via the RSS feeds.
Darn, I liked reading the posts from my RSS reader instead of opening it in my browser… Well, I hope the stolen article situation improves.
i still think rss is the way to see what’s new. you have some reader or plugin which displays last articles for you. headlines, that’s enough. if you are attracted by the headline, you just click on it and read the full post here, there’s no need to read it whole in rss feed even it’s little easier. but we are a weblog, counting with user feedback and other content which isn’t part of rss. so i think this small change can’t affect rss users that much. the content is still here…
I like the RLSLOG RSS Feed a lot! I use MS Outlook 2007 because I check my mail+feeds several times per day…
Keep up the good work~!!!
Because no one could steal the articles by just copying the HTML from the site…
Summaries aren’t going to protect from people stealing content, they just inconvenience users. Change it back please.
b, they actually can stop it and 1 out of these websites already disabled it. there are special scripts which simply fetches rss like every 30 minutes and reprint it on your website. the other, more complicated way i thought about is making some special copyright script, which would display a layer above the post with our url and you would have to click on it or do something like that - but that’s just a idea which may be realized later when many people express their disagreement with current form
you have just killed the main purpose of the rss with this stupid move and lost a rss reader for sure
veron, as i wrote earlier, the main purpose of rss feed is to know which new articles have been posted. check feeds of some aaa news servers, and you will see none of them offers full articles in rss, most of them just list the headline. rss wasn’t created as an alternative to html - is it really so hard to click on the title and read the post here? and of course, nothing is definitive, i can return it at any time.
I’m cool with the whole RSS summary thing, but keep the pictures in the RSS feed! xD
i think that way is the right way.
i use firefox inforss extension, that is amazing, and only show the headlines, if you’re interested enough you can click and see the full article in another tab.
by the way, where can I get the favicon of rlslog.net to make it easier to identify on inforss?
thanks.
Rafa: http://www.rlslog.net/wp-content/favicon.ico
There is much irony in a website dedicated to sharing information about ‘the scene’ complaining about intellectual property violations and copyright. If you insist on going to partial feeds than you should strongly consider writing better introductions. Half of the stuff I have no idea what its about until I read past the end of the summary.
If you are considering going back, consider blocking the scraping using various WP plugins available as well as employing the DMCA.
To cast my vote, I’m in the full feeds camp. What do the scrapers really get anyway?
“Half of the stuff I have no idea what its about until I read past the end of the summary.”
That’s because the posters on here create the summary themselves which are crap and then copy the rest from other websites and people praise them for it.
And they don’t like other people stealing their RSS crap because they make money from the ads on the site, you think this website is running for fun?
it’s good to know that you’re censoring the comments you dont like. scrapping the rss feed is still an awful idea
Yeh thanks martin, i love the fact i can now see new articles without having to keep checking. I use the firefox live bookmarks
so simple and I fully back your decision to what you’ve done.
Keep it up
Screw the copycat jerks, I’m all for anything that fucks them over.
They can suck ass.
I use Firefox, the rss is great and I’ve been using it for about a month or so. Very, very good as it enables me to keep track of what’s fresh. Many dozens of thank-you’s go to the superb crew of rlslog, and a special mention towards Shiny who’s really shone (pun intended) in the brief time he’s had with us. Keep up the good work!
I’m quite sad as I used to love receiving the whole article. It made it so much easier to read. I really hate having to click to read an article. Before I used to just scroll down the feed and read everything. If I am honest, I doubt I’ll read as many articles now.
Any chance you can switch it back?
Sorry to hear it came to that.
But I understand you and I hate to be ripped off for my work myself. Most importantly, I think the RSS feeds are still useful.
Keep up the good work.
crap!
NO - don’t do it!!!!! awful idea!!!
keep the fulltext n the feeds and just link back to yourself every now and then in your articles so anyone stealing your site directly from the rss feed links back to you
You’ve lost me as a reader then.
Kind of like stealing movies, games, TV-shows, DVD’s, albums and putting them on BitTorrent sites?
I come here becuase I prefer to read at the source, so other people are parsing your feed and claming it as there own? So what? You’re still pleasing people with your words. Is it all about viewers? Get over it.
please, full articles please please pleeeeeeaseeeee…
“No credits, no backlink, nothing.”
Uhm, yeah you kinda do the same every time you post tech news… So I’m totally not going to call you a hypocrite, at all. In fact I won’t even mention the word hypocrite.
Seriously though, think about it… >_>
i dont use rss.. so do whatever you like on your website
The only way to make money from content scraping is to rank well in Google. Do you honestly think people are making big bucks from scraping your site? That would mean that would have to rank somewhere near you on the search terms. Unlikely.
anyway u r leading the way martin ,, u Can notice the guests of those rippers that u are the only source of fresh data ..
finally i like Rss Cuz u r da bestt :))))))))))))
Guys, please, just deal with it. This is not your website, if you would like to comment, that is ok with everyone I suppose, but if you would like to flame the crew of rlslog for trying to protect their rss feed, then just keep it to yourself. If you think you can do better and complain so much, go make your own blog, if you can’t - quit complaining and deal with it. In the end this website belongs to the crew of rlslog, be glad they are providing us with such awesome info, stop wining and begging for more.
I like this new change very much! Just look how much better the rss feed looks in my Thunderbird. Praise Martin!
Before
http://picozilla.com/en/116046/screen10.jpeg.html
After
http://picozilla.com/en/116047/screen9.jpeg.html
YEah ..infact you guys did a good job…
You should atleast deserve some back links…
I too post your news at many forums, but i see to it that i mention the source in permalink, so that credit goes to release log and not me..
Hey, um, doesn’t this site encourage the breaking of copyright laws? Oh wait, just your stuff, nevermind.
WTF, why did you do this to us Martin?
Anyway…
You lost a reader.
I hate partial feeds with a vengeance.
Totally defeats the point of rss feeds, IMHO.
If you read more than a few feeds, then partial feeds and clicking through totally destroys work flow and feed-reading efficiency.
I have never heard a more hypocritical bunch of dog turd in all my life.
The entire content of your site is copied from the true owners, but you don’t give a flying donkey shit about that.
Makes me sick. SICK!
Although i’m still a great fan of your posts and work, I really cannot appreciate this change. I do understand the need for it though. I seriously hope some protection or automated backlink can be built in to bring it back to the full post. Unlike Mr X.’s screen, my thunderbird view seriously deteriorated by the change. I’m therefore absolutely not a fan.
If the change has to stay this way, i would suggest the first 3 lines of the post to contain real vital information. For a movie for example i consider this to be its genre and IMDB rating + links to the torrent and IMDB. Maybe other users want to add some fields that can fill up the space available. I’m sure the posters for games, music etc will also figure out how to post the most vital information on top.
I sincerely hope the change can be undone, and if not, that the above adjustments can be made. I really appreciate rlslog(-rss) too much to see it crippled like this.
this sucks. i’ll just stop reading if things don’t go back to like they used to be. too bad.
It has been an awful idea, actually.
It is so uncomfortable that I’m even thinking of stop reading rslog.
You guys should learn a few things from the Linux community. Even if there are people who use your work (very good work BTW), you are the reference point.
Those sites using your content are second class sites. You would read them having rslog? eh?
In fact, you could take advantage of it. Use them to promote rslog, for instance! Wouldn’t it be fair like that?
IMHO, to fuck up the RSS feed has been an awful idea. Please, fix it and let the people read rslog.
Not only that the feed is quite useless now, there are stupid ads included. Totally lame…
I used to read the feed mainly at work, obviously it is better to have all the information displayed by the reader than surfing around and getting caught by the boss..
People stealing your content because of a full-article RSS feed is a silly excuse to remove it.
For one, there is *NOTHING* to stop someone simply copy/pasting the content directly from the feed. It’s not going to stop people “stealing” your text.
Not sure if it’d work, but why not put a link to rlslog.net at the start of each RSS item, so any automated content-duplicators will automatically link back to the site? Since there’s no way to stop someone manually duplicating the content, you only really need too/can stop automated copiers..
As for the partial feed vs full feed - Full feeds are more convient. Sure, RSS is intended to let you know when a site is update (Well, sort of - It’s intended for syndication, thus the last “S” in RSS..), but a partial feed *only* tells you that there’s something new on the site, whereas a full RSS feed lets you know the site has new content, and allows you to quickly read over the new article - if I want to read comments, see similar entries, or open links, I’ll open the article
Considering this site is intended to make downloading new film releases and such more convenient (Saying which releases are better quality), the more convenient feed option should be the one used..
Unfortunately I disagree with the new changes as well, it was one of the major highlights of this site. I see no reason elaborating why do I think it was a bad change, many others have said it much better than I could.
If it doesn`t change back, I think I`m switching to other sites like hypoh or junknova.
Heh, the moment I posted, I noticed it`s back.
Its back
no
Hahaha.. Don’t you tell me this sites goes pro intellectual property?
Anyway, just make sure you mention your site in the Content itself.
Thomas
Stop trying to imitate me you little prick…
Wasn’t my intention to go personal with anyone here.
My opinion still stands tho.
Thomas
rofl
So you’re actually going to use RSS for what it was originally designed for. Headlines and a small description, do you want a prize or something, limey?
Just wanted to give a huge thanks for reversing on this. With the excerpt RSS feed the site pretty much went to being a slightly more indepth version of Nforce. Thumbs up big time.
This is the best way to go about it. RSS does stand for real simple syndication and it was originally designed to do with feeds what those others are doing with yours. Instead of being an idiot about it, you did the right thing.
While they may be using your feeds to populate their sites, you’re getting some traffic from it as well. So it’s Win Win (so long as you get your links in there).