Re: [syndication] Re: [RSS-DEV] How should a feed tell people it's gone?

[Jim Winstead <jimw-yahoo@trainedmonkey.com>]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 12:07:46PM -0800, Adam Kalsey wrote:
> At 11:55 AM 1/25/2002, you wrote:
> > >I've been noticing more than a few feeds have gone offline lately.
> > >A nearly equal number seem to come online so this isn't troubling.
> > >What I'm wondering, however, is what thoughts have been given
> > >toward aiding the feed consumer when a feed dies?
> >
> >What's wrong with HTTP 404?
> 
> Nothing, if the feed reader application notifies the person using it.
> But most readers don't ever tell the user about the error.

amen to this. i've been returning a 404 on a couple of feeds for months,
and those feeds are still getting more than 600 requests a day. (mostly
from radio userland clients.) one of them occassionally pops up as one
of the top 100 subscribed feeds at http://radio.weblogs.com/.

a good alternative to a 404 would be a 410 ('gone').

it would also be nice if clients handled a 301 properly, to update the
url that gets polled. (but in the grand scheme of things, that's not a
big deal.)

(and a special shout-out to the idiots at csociety.ecn.purdue.edu and
208.239.77.132 (isdn.132.data-concepts) that haven't noticed they've
been getting a 403 for every feed i publish for the last several months.
hundreds of requests a day, just wasting bandwidth.)

jim