Re: Approach to atompub implementation for a forum

["A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis@xxxxxx>]

* Brian Smith <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2007-12-13 05:30]:
> One-feed-per-forum and one-feed-per-article/thread are both not
> scalable. It would be better for each site to let the build a
> custom aggregated feed from all the threads that he is
> interested in.

Let me quote myself:

    If you just rely on RFC 4685 for threading, you can stick as
    much or as little data as you want into any particular feed.

The feed-per-forum model I proposed is a natural default that
will serve 99.8% of the forums on the web well; they have very
low or moderate traffic, so the size of feeds is not a grave
concern.

But even a modest forum will quickly accumulate a few thousand
threads, at which point a feed-per-thread scheme forces you to
either deal with polling thousands of subscriptions or find a
criterion by which to drop subscriptions. Usually that means you
drop feeds after a while with no activity, so you will miss any
posts that happen to get appended to old threads.

Places like the one that Eric mentions are an exception. However,
RFC 4685 can accommodate those too. It just requires building
more explicit machinery to let users prune the firehose to taste
before they attempt to drink from it.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>