Scienceblogs RSS and other dilemas

This post initially appeared on Science Blogs

The kinks continue to get ironed out one by one after our massive migration. Most of the major problems are happening on the backend, and are likely invisible to you guys (except for the fact that some typically prolific posters have slowed down a bit), but there are a couple of things that I've noticed that probably will affect you.

The biggest one is the RSS feeds, and specifically the "select" feed. If you usually use RSS to keep up to date on the blogs here, your old links are probably broken (at least, all of the one I had were). If you look at the right sidebar, there's a link to a new RSS feed on every blog, and those appear to be working fine. The select feed, on the other hand, remains broken. Our new interface doesn't have any mechanism to flag posts for the select feed anymore, and I couldn't tell you what the new feed url would be anyway. We're told they're working on it.

Another thing that might affect you in a roundabout way is the high levels of spam. The filters that had been built up over the years at moveable type seem to be gone, and it's a bit out of hand. I'm getting 15-20 spam comments per day, and I'm one of the lower traffic blogs. This is mostly a pain for us, but you might notice that it will take a bit longer for comments to get approved. The good new is, once you comment on someone's blog and they approve it, you should be automatically approved for future posts. I've started to close comments on older posts that are attracting the most spam - you might notice other bloggers doing the same.

Finally, you were promised threaded comments (the ability to reply directly to other comments), and that's not live yet, though supposedly it's coming.

So far, the web team has been incredibly responsive to our issues, and have fixed them pretty fast. Like I said, there are still a bunch of things that are higher priority on the backend, so it may take a while for these things to get sorted, but I'm sure it will happen sooner rather than later.

If you pick up on anything else problematic or that doesn't seem right, please let me know and I'll pass it up the chain.