There used to be RSS feeds for the site news, but they’ve moved. Do they still exist, or have they been removed for good?

As far as I’m aware, it exploded when the forum was upgraded, so it was removed. The plan was to re-implement it At Some Point but I don’t think it’s particularly high on the priorities list.

I could be 100% wrong here though so don’t quote me on this. I’ll raise it with Tech, it’s a good question.

Basically I’m not reading STW news anymore because I’m a luddite who still uses RSS readers…

Yeah it’s gone 🙁 A real pain in the arse and makes the “there’s a front page?” jokes real for me as an RSS reader is how I access all articles I am interested in. Having one single news outlet that I have to seek out differently from all my others make a real barrier.

From the horses mouth went I emailed them;
“Hi Tim,
I hope you had a good Easter weekend.

I’m sorry to say we have removed the RSS features from our site because they were impacting on the sites performance. Not only that but they were an easy target for bots to target.

There are a few other smaller reasons too as to why we removed the RSS feeds but those are the two main reasons. As such we felt it would be better to sacrifice that feature in aim to improve overall site usability and performance for the user.

Sorry for any inconvenience but if there is anything else I can help with please let me know by dropping me an email.

Thanks,

Tom”

Yeah, I’ve had confirmation from Mark also, there were other issues too and therefore there’s no plan to bring it back. Sorry.

With a trivial cache the performance problems should be trivial to solve. How is a RSS feed harder to generate than the front page in HTML?

Notably I do get my MTB news from Pinkbike these days, because it has a RSS feed…

Ooh I didn’t know that was available Ross. Off to subscribe as the lack of RSS for the news is a bugbear of mine. The “improvements” here are slowly driving me away.

With a trivial cache the performance problems should be trivial to solve. How is a RSS feed harder to generate than the front page in HTML?

Because,

there were other issues too

…which I’m probably not at liberty to discuss so you’re just going have to trust me on this I’m afraid.

I’ll be upfront here. RSS feeds give content away for free. No ads, no subs, no revenue at all. It makes no commercial sense to allow it.

On a technical note it really causes havoc with performance and is a bugger to setup when you have paywalled content. Not beyond the realms of technical fixing but then we’d have spent resources and money building a thing that loses us money.

And another thing….

🙂

We’ve had content scraped and republished illegally by numerous websites and apps via our RSS feeds

Sure, I get that. Why not just put the first paragraph or even just the title in the feed?

For example, https://off.road.cc/rss.xml.

Because the performance issues don’t merit it.
But also even a short paragraph means that off site you are making a choice about coming to the site or not. RSS feeds simply make no commercial sense.
If you know of a commercial reason for any media site running an RSS then I’m all ears.

Anecdote/data caveat obviously, but I’m visiting your web site at most once a week these days, down from typically daily when there was RSS to see new stories I wanted to read (typically the RSS was a little borked, no photos in fresh goods friday for example).

Agree with a number of the points above, caching RSS isn’t really that hard and can then be offloaded to cheap serving. VitalMTB for example only gets his from me because of their RSS feed, I have to (google) search for content to lead me to Singletrack. Vital manage to publish a snippet and then drive traffic to web site, seems like it would generate more human traffic, not less. Bots, spiders and crawlers can get what they want without an RSS feed – google is proof of that right now.
The commercial reason is demand (see subscriber requests above), a proven push notification mechanism (or as good as), the ability to advertise paywall content to non subscribers which may not be discoverable through crawling (attraction) and reduced load on the home page with more people able to jump direct to articles. As an aside you get the data on most relevant articles based purely on content and a separate view on the effect of home page layout on journey to content (research data for targeting content vs layout).
I don’t know all your reasons for not wanting it, but there are still reasons to consider it.

I seem to have a load of STW articles in my RSS reader this evening. Has it been resurrected (yay!) or just a glitch in the matrix?

Still seems to be working – thanks STW!

I must have removed the dead RSS feeds from my reader, what’s the URL you’re getting updates on?