After much miscommunication and not knowing a straight answer regarding this, I've finally received information from avva stating that we do in fact support Atom feeds. Which we knew already, but the few that do work on LiveJournal don't work because they're similar to RSS 2.0-- avva wrote native support for Atom feeds himself. So we've been giving a bit of wrong information out in our answers!

Any Atom feeds that validate through feedvalidator.org and do not work on LiveJournal should be zilla'd for avva. Please search the past bugs before opening a new one because I doubt we want a zilla bug for each one that doesn't work ;) Also, please CC me on zilla bugs relating to this.

Thanks! :)

As most of you are aware, Syn currently grants courtesy I2 privileges once a volunteer earns supporthelp in another category. Starting this next quarter and year (e.g. tomorrow ;), there will be no more Syn courtesy privs.

After activity statistics for this quarter/year become available to me, I will be reviewing all volunteers who currently have interims in Syn, and downgrading privs according to activity and skill levels.

If you currently have I2 in Syndication but only due to one or more supporthelps elsewhere, you will likely be dropped to having no privs in Syn. Again, each volunteer will be reviewed individually. However, I use the term "review" loosely -- you will not be receiving an email with a review for each answer/touch like a typical "review". This would be pointless for many volunteers anyway due to having zero touches in Syndication.

More information regarding gaining privs in Syn will be posted in coming days, for those who are eager to earn their privs back.

Any questions regarding this new syn policy can be directed to me using my @livejournal.com email address. Thanks! :)

In this thread on the News post about userpics, bradfitz asks:

We never meant for those to be restrictive. Just for anti-abuse. (we're always paranoid with new features)

The syn subsystem is pretty damn robust/fast now, though, so maybe we should up everything.

How many syn points you think would be good?

Just so y'know. I've given my 2c. :-)

This is an open invitation to anyone who cares. What can I (im my capacity of admin of the syndication category) do for you?

Other admins, is there anything I could do to smoothe over any places syn relates to your category?
Supporthelps, are there any current policies that you don't like, or any suggestions you have?
Screenies and interims, are there any policies that you want clarification on? Are there any training documents that you want but that don't exist?

Basically, I want to know anything I could do to help you. I don't guarantee that I'll be able to do anything, but I want to know if anyone has any problems, ideas or anything. I know I owe one or two people reviews and things, and I have a few other ideas in my own mind, but I'm planning on being productive, and I want to know what I should be being productive with. If you aren't comfortable commenting here for whatever reason, then feel free to email me instead.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: Weird Al Yankovic - Christmas at Gound Zero

What follows below is an overview and a line-by-line walkthrough of the part of the LiveJournal source code which handles the retrieval of RSS feeds, conversion to journal entries, and storage of those entries in the LiveJournal database.

Understanding this document is not required of Syndication volunteers. I expect that most volunteers will not use this, or maybe will find the overview interesting. It's a reference I wrote up to help me diagnose one problem a long time ago, and I figured I might as well make it public.

(That said, I encourage anyone to comment with questions, requests for clarifications, and so forth, even if you think your question is silly.)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: geeky

This issue has been coming up quite a lot on pople's priv tests, so I thought I'd try to explain:

There are several different verions of RSS -- notably, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 and 2.0. Of these, 0.9x and 2.0 are of the same family, whereas 1.0 is pretty much an entirely different format. The RSS file outputted by LiveJournal at http://www.livejournal.com/exampleusername/rss is version 0.91. The version output by the custom style hack mentioned a while back in lj_nifty is 0.92. It would also be possible to create custom styles to output other versions of RSS, but so far as I am aware nobody has done so yet.

When it comes to reading RSS from other sites, for syndication onto LiveJournal, an externally written perl module, XML::RSS is used. This officially supports, and hence LiveJournal also officially supports, versions 0.9, 0.91 and 1.0 of RSS. However, as 0.92 and 2.0 are based on 0.91, many feeds that use these versions of RSS will also work, due to backwards compatibilty -- it isn't guaranteed, but it's a good bed.

Additionally, later versions of RSS (1.0 and 2.0) are also extensible -- their specifications allow for additional elements to be included that are not part of the main specifications, without invalidating the file as RSS. LiveJournal doesn't support any of these though. As such, if the feed relies on these extra twiddly bits in order to work, they won't function correctly when syndicated onto LiveJournal. this is frequently the case with valid RSS 1.0 feeds that LiveJournal doesn't like.

Thanks to our crack userdoc team, we now have a new syndication FAQ, How do I find a syndicated account? which should be used for all appropriate requests. Referencing adcott's thingy is also highly encouraged, although hopefully won't be needed for too long.

I've propsed several new syndication FAQs be added. Anyone who doesn't read lj_userdoc may wish to take a look.

The syn_edit priv (that allows a user to change the feed URL for a syndicated account) is now live and operational. Brad has decided that the best way for this to operate is for it to be limited to LiveJournal employees. As such, policy for dealing with this sort of request is as follows:

If they want to change the contents that is being fed (if someone wanted dilbert_daily to syndicate content from slashdot, for example) then we tell them that this is against policy and won't be done.

If they want to change from one feed to another feed of the same content, then we can do this only under any of the following circumstances:

The feed currently in use is either broken or clearly deprecated
The person making the request is the only person viewing the feed (or there are no viewers)
The request comes from the webmaster of the feed.

If none of these are the case (for example, a website gives an official feed which is currently being used and the user wants to use a feed from a screenscraper that gives full entries rather than links) then we tell them that this is against policy and that they'll have to create a new account.

All levels of volunteer are free to submit this sort of answer.

If they want to make a legitimate change, then screened volunteers should leave the request alone. If they don't provide full necessary information (eg, the URL of the new feed that they want syndicated) then any priv can comment to ask them for more informaion.

In cases where we can edit the feed URL and no further information is required, I'd like to ask that you leave these requests for me and I will contact the relevant people. I've discussed this with rahaeli and we both agree that this is the best way to handle this. The main advantage of this is that if any problem comes up, or if it isn't being handled in a timely manner, then this puts me in a position where I can follow up on things a lot more easily.

I know that it's a pain to have requests sitting there and knowing what the issue is and still not being able to touch them, but I'd really appreciate it if you can leave that sort of thing for me to deal with.

Thanks a lot.