Would it be useful/appropriate to remove news about betas and RCs?

[Doug Barton]

Murray Stokely wrote:
> 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.

True, but most of the other RSS feeds I subscribe to have more volume,
which means the less relevant stuff goes away much faster than ours do.

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

I would argue that anything would be more relevant than beta/RC
announcements after a release. :)

> Do you have an example RSS feed that does this kind of pruning in a
> good way? 

I don't, but I'm more interested in what's right for us.

> Wouldn't this confuse some feed readers?

This question is one of the main reasons that I didn't Just Do It.

In any case, there does not seem to be any support for my proposal, so
in the immortal words of Emily Litella, "Never mind." :)

Doug

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