On: Please add a link to comments in the RSS feed

[pg]

We do (look at the source) but most feed readers seem to ignore it. If anyone can tell us how to format the feed so that stops happening, we're all ears.

[brett → pg]

Like I (opaquely?) said last time this came up (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12380 ) you could try giving each <item> a <description> child with an escaped link in it a la reddit (http://reddit.com/.rss )

[busy_beaver → pg]

Feedvalidator finds a couple of problems, but I'm not sure that they're related.

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Frss

Maybe try generating an Atom feed? Atom seems to be much better defined than any of the myriad competing RSS implementations.

Or maybe toss a hyperlink into the description tag rather than the comments tag ... from what I see in the RSS 2.0 spec, comments is a more of a "should" rather than a "must". The spec itself refers to it as an optional element, and Winer (I think) says in a note that implementers "should" support it. Clearly some of them don't. :-)

[busy_beaver → busy_beaver]

Someone mentioned below that it's working on Reddit. I just looked at their feed, and it looks like they are indeed putting the comments link inside "description" rather than "comments".