Planet Erlang

Posted by Daniel Lyons Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:50:00 GMT

Planet Erlang used to be in my list of aggregated sites. It’s not anymore, and because I don’t see a good place on the site to leave feedback, I’m leaving it here.

  • Planet Erlang is the only RSS feed that spams me. There’s no excuse. Planet Io doesn’t, Planet Haskell doesn’t, Planet Lisp doesn’t, Planet Erlang had better figure out how that’s happening and make it stop. Killing the item after it gets posted isn’t good enough if it still winds up in my RSS reader, which it does.
  • Planet Erlang’s RSS feed is one point shy of completely useless to begin with. The whole point of an RSS feed is to bring me the content without me having to ask. Planet Erlang brings me a one sentence description of the content—in the title and the body. Who thought this was a good idea?
  • Finally, when I do click on the title of the story, I wind up not at the story, but at Planet Erlang’s web page with Planet Erlang’s one-sentence summary of the story. Then I have to click again to get to the site.

Here’s a refresher on how RSS is supposed to work:

  1. I sit on my ass, reading news.

Here’s what actually happens with Planet Erlang:

  1. I sit on my ass, getting spam.
  2. Once in a while I see an interesting article’s title.
  3. I click on it to read it, because it isn’t already there in my news reader where it should be.
  4. I click on it again to get away from PE’s site and read it.

All this so I can see comments from someone about the site being linked to. Invariably, there are none for me to see. I’m invited to vote on the story. Invariably, the story has one vote.

I don’t know what you guys think running a Planet-style aggregator is all about, but you’re failing it, and you’re being an obstacle to the information I’m there to get.

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  1. Avatar Michael Herrick said about 1 hour later:

    What do you think? How big should an article be before you don’t get all of it in the RSS feed? I personally prefer summaries (one paragraph, not one sentence) in the RSS feed with a link directly to the story. And there better not be a bunch of graphics and ads in the web story.

  2. Avatar Bill Weiss said about 9 hours later:

    The Gentoo Weekly News (or whatever it’s called) does the link-to-a-link thing to me as well. I’ve been thinking I should write them a surly email, thanks for the reminder!

  3. Avatar code17 said 1 day later:

    I’m using a plain one and brothres (try the same url convention for lisp, haskell, caml_en)

  4. Avatar Bill Weiss said 9 days later:

    I just remembered: the VIM tips RSS used to do this as well. I recall being really irritated that I would click on things and get a 404. At least put in a damn “used to be spam, nevermind” page so I know what happened!

  5. Avatar Mickaël Rémond said 11 days later:

    Hello,

    Regarding the spam: Planet Erlang is user contributed. Spam are not promoted to good stories however. If you want to avoid spam, subscribe to the feed on the main page, not the upcoming stories (Spam are filtered out quickly however).

    Regarding the direct access to the story, we will try to get a fix.

  6. Avatar Mickaël Rémond said 11 days later:

    Hello,

    You should like better the new behaviour of the RSS agreggation.

    Please, let me know if you have other comments.

  7. Avatar Mickaël Rémond said 11 days later:

    By the way, the fact that the article you visit have only one vote is because you are reading the upcoming news feed. Published feeds have much more vote. That’s the point of voting: marking the article as valuable for publication by the mean of votes.

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