

Wanna know when someone has commented on your post? - tcarnell

(Blantant product plug ahead :-)<p>I recently posted a question on Hacker News about receiving online payments in the UK - I got a lot of really great answers - thanks everyone.<p>Because these answers are important to me, I didn't want to miss any valuable comments. Very simply, I created a Femtoo tracker pointing to this URL:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074860<p>that monitors the small text "33 comments" text below the post title. Everytime a new comment was posted, I received an Instant Message telling me how many comments there are.<p>I think this may be really useful to other Hacker News readers... so please check out 'Femtoo.com' :-)<p>If you don't want to register - fine, you can still receive notifications of trackers that other people have 'published':<p>http://www.femtoo.com/index.php?action=TrackerLibraryLoad<p>thanks for you time.
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jacquesm
Sounds like an excellent way to get your server banned. After all, if it does
that 'the instant' it happens then it has to periodically poll the server.

Since HN is already creaking at the seams I'm really not happy with this kind
of bot based service.

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hga
That's not what he said, he said the notification was by "Instant Message",
not that the notification was "instant".

Obviously it have to poll the page, but in principle that can be polite,
ideally it'll have a decay feature where if it hasn't been updated in a while
the checks will by steps decay to, say, once a day, then once a week, then
once a month, and give up after, say, 5 years.

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jacquesm
But it would have to be polling to get a response in a way that is quicker
than you could get by visiting HN a couple of times.

So, the question then becomes how frequently does it poll?

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tcarnell
at the momment, every 30 minutes.

