What is the status on RSS news feeds? [Rejected]

[doppler]

The last of the old board to happen. Or did it happen? I don't see links for the feed(s).

RSS is so 90's. But I like it.

 

[RogueKitsune]

Anything that was on the old site will eventually be reimplemented. Quality of life features, such as RSS, are the lowest priority.

 

[doppler]

eventually be reimplemented.

I can't remember a single old board feature still needing to be re implemented. I agree it's a lowest priority. But I like it to be informed of good stuff I am watching. Not everything I watch needs immediate attention. Solo leveling was one of those phenomenon's, I always wanted to view, ASAP. Mairimashita! Iruma-kun IMHO is one of the few worth while to me.

 

[kouyo]

I can't remember a single old board feature still needing to be re implemented.

Aside from RSS, view count of titles, chapters, and groups are still missing. We have a larger volume of people asking for those, so that's the next big thing devs are working on.

 

[doppler]

Aside from RSS, view count of titles, chapters, and groups are still missing.

Ok, the more knowledge you collect the more power you have. BwaaHaaHaa, I am now more powerful.

 

[shwiftyshfifty]

Aside from RSS, view count of titles, chapters, and groups are still missing. We have a larger volume of people asking for those, so that's the next big thing devs are working on.

+1 for can has RSS pllssssss.

 

[kirbo]

+1 for can has RSS pllssssss.

I concur

 

[doppler]

@shwiftyshfifty @kirbo
I concur too, but other things are not finished yet. (they are working on it). As told by devs, RSS wil most likely be last thing done. RSS is ancient, just like IRC. Both are throws backs to the BBS and text message boards days.

RSS up and running is no small en devour.

 

[kirbo]

@shwiftyshfifty @kirbo
I concur too, but other things are not finished yet. (they are working on it). As told by devs, RSS wil most likely be last thing done. RSS is ancient, just like IRC. Both are throws backs to the BBS and text message boards days.

RSS up and running is no small en devour.

Depending on the implementation (https://mangadex.dev/mangadex-v5-infrastructure-overview/) , the feed page is a dump of SQL table stuff. All you need to do is parse the last 25 feed items into a very basic xml (https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp) and in the user info tables attach rss file path for each user. which you can link to on the profile or something. Obviously make it so that the file path is pseudo random to stop people like, sequentially going through feeds. At least thats how I'd do it on a small scale server. I know that they're not really dealing with that and security is top priority. But like, stop acting like this shit is hard. Now, how a server acts to having to update 60,000 rss feeds cause a popular manga drops would be interesting however its already kind of already tasking the server every time somebody checks their update page cause its asking for new stuff.

My apologies for the rant, I'm sure the devs could do it in 3 days + code review + qa. But yeah they prioritizing other, much harder stuff but not soley like incrementing a counter or two on a page click or on the flag of a manga closing (just with catching duplicates from the same users).

 

[Fenatix]

I'm just going to necro this. I need my feeds back!

 

[kouyo]

Hi everyone, unfortunately there aren't any plans to bring back RSS, please stay tuned.

 

[boursk]

I was certain it was on the list of planned features before. I guess this post above was meant to show that this feature has been removed from the list, given the edit on planned features post being close to the post above? I'm also not sure what to stay tuned for if there are no plans implement it (anymore). In case it goes back on the planned features list?

This feature is the reason why I ended up creating my account: just so I could make and use my own server app that produces an RSS feed for newly uploaded English translated chapters of the manga I'm reading. It's fairly easy to do if you use the MangaDex API. I'd rather have an RSS feed provided by MangaDex myself as well, but there's at least a way to get this if you really want it...

 

[kouyo]

Hi everyone.

To clarify, the overhead required to support it is quite high relative to its usage. We’ve decided to prioritize other features, making an RSS rollout unlikely.

 

[boursk]

To clarify, the overhead required to support it is quite high relative to its usage.

Can you expand on that a little bit more?

Is there a concern that people will setup the RSS feed in their RSS client and never make use of it (i.e. click on a link from the RSS feed)? That would be a situation where MangaDex would incur the overhead for no reason. But then you could do something like have every RSS link reset a "last accessed" value and disable the RSS feed when the last accessed value is longer than a certain period.

Outside of that, if people don't subscribe to the RSS feed, they're not polling the server, so there shouldn't be any (meaningful) overhead. Or is the concern that the overhead per RSS subscription so high that no type of caching could keep the total overhead low enough for MangaDex to handle the strain (but then I don't understand the "relative to its usage" part)?

 

[kouyo]

The reality is that RSS is a "legacy" technology. The overhead isn't just server load, it's development cost. To implement your suggestion of a "lease" or "auto-disable" system, the devs would have to write, test, and maintain a custom tracking engine just to keep a niche feature from crashing the servers.

In a world where 99% of users are using the API or the site, spending that much engineering time on the 1% who use RSS readers is hard to justify.

 

[boursk]

But if you're just talking about development cost, we're just going back to the demand issue (which was what your original post talked about before it was deleted). Then again, I'm kind of sensing that you're also hinting at some prejudice against the technology itself by starting out to emphasize that RSS is a "legacy" technology?
I'm obviously not trying to attack you, but it does give the impression that it wouldn't matter if there was widespread demand for the feature or not; it's not going to be implemented regardless. Which would feel a bit unreasonable if true, but it'd be a stance you're entitled to take.

So in the end, is it about upvotes in this thread (since theoretically given enough demand, it would justify whatever development cost) or is there a clear stance that it won't be implemented, regardless of the demand for the feature?

a custom tracking engine

That's kind of blowing up the situation. 😅

All you'd have to do is add a column in the user table (or any other low cost resource to retrieve data from to avoid changing the user table from being static data to dynamic data) that keeps track of the last accessed dtime, then add an endpoint specifically for the RSS links in the feed that will update the field and redirect to the selected manga chapter. The feed link itself would check the last updated field before doing the expensive call and reject it if it's past a certain period.

It's neither complicated nor prohibitively expensive to implement/test/maintain.