[Fwd: Re: Would it be useful/appropriate to remove news about betas and RCs?]

[Murray Stokely]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:14 AM, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> This is sort of along the lines I was thinking, especially about the front
> page, and I think that keeping all of the news on the news flash page is
> also a good idea.
>
> I'd like to suggest however that in the RSS feed that they are not valuable.
> If I'm looking at the RSS feed as my source of news about FreeBSD it's not
> really relevant to me that there were N betas/RCs prior to the release, I
> just want to see the news about the release.
>
> I'm not suggesting that the information about betas and RCs is not valuable,
> I just think we need to differentiate between "news" and "history."

I've never seen items purged like this from an RSS feed.  The
chronological nature of RSS makes the older stuff just sort of sink
down out of view as newer stuff takes precedence in your feed reader.

Removing some old items will just cause even older items to appear
higher on the list which could also be irrelevant.

Do you have an example RSS feed that does this kind of pruning in a
good way?  Wouldn't this confuse some feed readers?

                     - Murray