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

[Bill Fitzgerald]

Hello, Greg,

Thank you for this feedback - it is incredibly useful.

Cheers,

Bill

On 6/2/10 11:35 AM, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> 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
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