[consulting] How widespread is the use of RSS for comments?

[Greg Knaddison]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Domenic Santangelo <domenics at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 2, 2010, at 7:16 AM, Greg Knaddison wrote:
>
>> * In a 1.5 hour period the apache access log shows a few dozen
>> subscribers to the node's comments via RSS feed (I don't have easy
>> access to the access log beyond that 1.5 hour window)
>
> Are you sure they're not spiders?

Yes. For proof and for others to be able to run this on their Apache logs...

### First, I grepped the apache log for the string "crss" because
that's the prefix used for the comment rss feed on this site

grep crss example.org > /home/greggvs/noderss_greg.txt

### Here are the bots I grepped out (I identified these by trial and
error, removing one and looking for names of other bots)

cat noderss_greg.txt | grep -v msnbot | grep -v Slurp | grep -v
twiceler | grep -v Googlebot | grep -v searchdnabot | grep -v scoutjet
| grep -v Exabot > nobots.txt

### And from there:

cat nobots.txt | gawk '{print $7 " " $11 " " $12 " " $13 " " $14 " "
$15}' | sort | uniq | less

I've now got 3 hours of access log data and it's up to nearly 150
subscriptions from unique users to unique threads and a handful of
people using Google Reader on the same thread.

My earlier conclusion is strengthened: on at least some sites RSS is a
reasonably popular alternative to mail notifications on node threads.

Cheers,
Greg

Greg Knaddison | 303-800-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com
Mastering Drupal | http://www.masteringdrupal.com