Re: Where should remedial RSS 2.0 questions be directed?

Sam Ruby wrote:
>A while back, I switched the Feed Validator mailing list from
> SourceForge to Google Groups in the hopes that it would address the
> problem with spam we were experiencing at the time.  While that was
> fairly successful so far (knock on wood), the overwhelming amount of
> what remains are fairly basic RSS 2.0 questions.
>
> The problem is that none of the RSS Advisory Board members are active
> participants on this mailing list.

For the record I am subscribed to the list, and I probably would participate 
more if I weren't so busy. However, the impression I get is that many of the 
questions aren't really RSS (or Atom) questions at all. I'll often find 
myself thinking about replying to someone, but then I look at the error 
message that the feedvalidator gave them, and I realise I'd just be 
repeating what it has already said.

Feedvalidator: "pubDate must be a valid RFC2822 date".
My response: "You need to change the contents of your pubDate element so 
that it is a valid RFC2822 date".
Their predicted followup: "How do I do that?".

That's not an RSS question. That's a tech support question for whatever 
software or service produced their feed. Or possibly a programming question 
if they're producing the feed themselves. I know I can't help them with 
that, so I don't reply.

I know not all the questions are like that, but that's just the impression 
I've been getting lately.

Regards
James



 
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