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New Boost website
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News RSS feed entries contain no useful text #1088

Open Lastique opened 5 months ago

Lastique commented 5 months ago

https://www.preview.boost.org/feed/news.rss

Each news entry in the News RSS feed contains text of the form "External link to .", which is useless. RSS entries are supposed to contain the actual content of the news entry, possibly reduced, if the article is lengthy. The URL to the full article is already included in the html/head/base tag and is accordingly rendered by Thunderbird in the entry description.

For example, here is one of the entries:

From - Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000
X-Mozilla-Status: 0041
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
Received: by localhost; Thu, 6 Jun 2024 14:05:54 +0300
Date: Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000
Message-Id: <http://www.boost.io/news/entry/wg21-boost-and-the-ways-of-standardization/@localhost.localdomain>
From: <News>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: WG21, Boost, and the Ways of Standardization
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Base: http://www.boost.io/news/entry/wg21-boost-and-the-ways-of-standardization/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>WG21, Boost, and the Ways of Standardization</title>
    <base href="http://www.boost.io/news/entry/wg21-boost-and-the-ways-of-standardization/">
  </head>
  <body id="msgFeedSummaryBody" selected="false">
    External link to <a href='https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1cyxh9n/wg21_boost_and_the_ways_of_standardization/'>https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1cyxh9n/wg21_boost_and_the_ways_of_standardization/</a>.
  </body>
</html>

Here is how it looks in Thunderbird:

Screenshot_20240606_141439

The main benefit of using RSS is not having to browse through a dozen of websites for news articles and having all or most of the information readily available in the news reader app. Posting news entries with a single URL in the body counters that.

BTW, following the link shows this page, which is also not useful and poorly formatted:

Screenshot_20240606_141606

Note that the URL is not highlighted as clickable.

kennethreitz commented 5 months ago

The confusion here is that we're often posting external content (content hosted on another website) as links in our RSS, hence why "External link to ..." was added by myself, because before there would be no content at all. The intention with your RSS Reader for posts like this, is to click on the link in the top part of the interface and visit the URL. We added "External link to..." to improve the reader experience.

Lastique commented 5 months ago
  1. Is it possible to pull the content from those external websites? If it is, then that content should be put into the RSS entry (and possibly on the Boost website, if we're going to integrate external content at all).
  2. If pulling the content is not possible then such "link-only" entries should be removed from the News RSS, which should remain roughly equivalent to the current website's News RSS.
  3. If you still want to provide an RSS feed with external content then please do that a separate RSS feed. But then make it so that the URL in the Content-Base and head/base lead directly to the external article/post rather than a stopgap page on boost.io. I still think such RSS feed would be rather useless, though.
vinniefalco commented 5 months ago

I don't know anything about RSS. I am not certain if pulling in the external content is a good idea. I would be curious what the industry standards are, and if there is any information on which implementation better drives engagement. Speaking of which, I also wonder how much value the RSS will bring.

The main goal of the website is to drive qualified traffic. That is, people who are interested in C++ libraries and may become prospective new users or better yet contributors, as Boost participation has been on the decline for a decade. We need to have some estimate of how much the RSS will benefit the site in order to know how much energy we should invest currently.

This is not to say we should not have RSS; Quite the opposite, we will have it and it will be the best it can be. However I'm not sure that right now is the time to do that.

As long as there are no obvious bugs, an RSS feed which just links externally when the corresponding News item is also an external link is good enough for me. We do plan to have an in-site text editor and blog posting feature but that is not scheduled for the initial release.

Lastique commented 5 months ago

If pulling content is a concern then just removing the "link-only" entries from the News feed would be fine by me.

vinniefalco commented 5 months ago

It isn't that I mind pulling content. My personal preference is to keep users on the site :) I just don't know what best practices is, as I am significantly out of touch with web development. The argument against pulling content is that it duplicates the information and loses the original styling... I think... I could be wrong. I guess you could say, I don't know!

Lastique commented 5 months ago

Normally, you don't pull the content. Not for RSS, not for the website. Besides technical difficulties, content copyright should be considered, although I'm not sure how it applies to comments and alike. If users are interested in Reddit comments, they should go to Reddit. If Reddit provides RSS, they subscribe to that RSS feed. (If it doesn't, they complain to Reddit or grudgingly walk away, but that's not a problem to be solved by the Boost website anyway.)

In my experience, the main reason why websites want to maximize user presence is maximizing AD revenue and user data collection. Which I don't think is the case with the Boost website, is it?

I think, if you want to make the Boost website more alive and active then you should make it the source of the new content rather than aggregate content from third party resources. For example, if you want to publish an article or an extended post on some topic (like the MP11 article Peter wrote), you should be encouraged to publish it on the Boost website rather than on Reddit or whatever. You can leave the link to it on third party websites and have a discussion there, if you like, but the main source would be the Boost website. This would solve the problem with RSS as well, as we'd be able to produce a meaningful news entry from the article. That's my admittedly shallow understanding, anyway.

vinniefalco commented 5 months ago

the main reason why websites want to maximize user presence is maximizing AD revenue and user data collection. Which I don't think is the case with the Boost website, is it?

In the traditional sense, no, but I do think there is value in having better data. An ongoing problem is that we have no way to measure the usage and popularity of various libraries or even release versions. Getting that information from our current release process and downloads hosting is basically impossible.

My idea is to make the new website offer a lot of regularly posted new content, and polish the existing resources to the point where users have a reason to keep returning. For example, to read new blog posts on C++ design or updates to popular Boost libraries.

And later, I want to give users the opportunity to give back by registering an account and filling our surveys. That is, they would be opting-in to furnishing us with data. For example we might ask "which of the following objects do you use in your project?"

  1. std::variant
  2. boost::variant
  3. boost::variant2

This is a contrived example but you get my point. We could also ask about what Boost versions they are using at work, at home, how they receive the download, and so on. And maybe we could reward people for answering questions with some kind of points or karma like reddit.

I don't quite know but this is the spirit of what we might try to do. Every so often during a discussion, Boost contributors will say "if only we had a way to know if _____" related to how Boost is used or consumed. I want to have a way to answer those questions.

I think, if you want to make the Boost website more alive and active then you should make it the source of the new content rather than aggregate content from third party resources.

Yes I agree with this. We don't have a robust blogging system but when we do, we could consider rewarding people who post original content with karma or whatever. Maybe they could earn a custom frame graphic around their avatar.