
Please add a link to comments in the RSS feed - cmars232

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cmars232
Hi, I mainly read YC Startup News through a news aggregator. Could ya'll add a
link to comments for each entry in the feed?

(This might be a good idea for Reddit's feeds too...)

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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.

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busy_beaver
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. :-)

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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".

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ralph
Paul, might you modify the submissions page to have some guidelines?

Point people to the Feature Requests thread as they clearly don't notice the
link at the bottom of the page. Remind them that this is Startup News so it
would be good if the posting was applicable. Tell them where to find Slashdot
if that's what they want. And explain that they are not the only ones with RSS
feeds so they don't need to just copy links from there to here.

Personally, I think news quality has degraded since karma came along. Some
people are clearly keen to move up the leader board and starting a new thread
is one way to do that. How about not rewarding karma for a thread's score? It
can still be voted up by others to show it's interesting but karma must be
earned by quality comments on the thread. Either that, or let us down vote
threads to penalise non-applicable threads.

Better statistics may help show some light.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18085>

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3KWA
+1 reddit does it indeed ... very convenient ;)

