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RSS feed spoiled for good?
Authored by: jdv on Jun 03, '06 12:59:55AM

I see you've put the ads back in the hints feed... As I've written in an email to robg earlier I find that reallly annoying, and spoiling the whole concept of RSS feeds. I mean, a feed that shows 20 articles in Safari shouldn't have to be pulling 119 files over http (even if they're small).

Is the change permanent?



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RSS feed spoiled for good?
Authored by: robg on Jun 03, '06 05:27:11AM
Ads in feeds are a business decision that I'm not involved with in any way. I manage the site's content and functionality, and try to make it useful to the people who read it. How and where ads appear is completely up to the sales side of the business.

If you have feedback on the ads, I strongly recommend letting the Sales group know your feelings -- you can find contact info for them on this page at Macworld's site -- scroll down a bit to see their entries. Janet Ryan is the VP of Sales and Marketing, and Kenji Kawakami is the Online Ad Coordinator, and those are probably two good starting points.

I'm sorry the ads are offensive to you, and I hope you'll let the Sales team know your feelings.

-rob.

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RSS feed spoiled for good?
Authored by: luomat on Jun 03, '06 05:38:10AM

"Spoiled" is a rather exaggerated word. (Perhaps 'tainted' would be a more appropriate :-)

I suspect a lot of people started using RSS because they were ad-free ways of getting information from websites. Well, like the rest of the web, it doesn't come free to create and maintain.

IF the feeds were abbreviated down to 1 or 2 lines, that would make them spoiled. If the feeds were just headlines (i.e. forcing you to go to the site to read them at all) then I would call them spoiled.

I am disappointed, however, that the feeds have ads and are not full-text.

Having full text feeds (which were thus saved in my reader and available for Spotlight or at least searching in my RSS reader) would be much better than the current situation, where I usually get most but not all of the article, meaning that I then have to go to the site to read the rest of the article (often only another line or paragraph).

This is particularly bothersome given that I read the feeds on my cell phone, and loading the site is rather painful.

The new feeds seem to be longer, but still not full text. I wish they were, especially now that there are ads.



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RSS feed spoiled for good?
Authored by: Superboy on Jun 16, '06 01:57:48AM

You can easily stop adverts showing up by telling your computer's firewall (my router's firewall does this with my setup) to stop loading pages that have the address:

macosxhints/recent?i

Every advert is an image and banning any URL that contains the exact address above (it must be in the ban list exactly as above, no www or .com) will stop the image from showing!

It works great! Safari just shows a little ? now. Much nicer.



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