RSS feeds need updateFrequency to limit scans by Outlook

[_ck_]

I discovered a few visitors were pulling down the RSS feeds thousands of times each day without realizing it. This turned out to be because they are using the new Office 12/2007 update with IE7 and that makes it pull down the entire feed every time they check mail, sometimes every 10 minutes or less (thanks Microsoft!)

This problem is about to become widespread when many more people upgrade.

RSS feed needs this namespace added

xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"

then specify an hourly frequency maximum check time:

<sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency>

Comments Feed needs the addition as well, perhaps atom feeds too.

+1

This would really help reduce the load due to some stupid feed readers without resorting to feedburner, which is what a lot of people have done to deal with it.

Related discussion:

 http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2002/10/19/joels-rss-problem

I guess the patch solves it for the RSS 2.0 feeds (posts and comments).

I seriously cannot believe it's taken TWO YEARS to include this trivial fix for a fairly common issue given the sheer number of Outlook users. Is it just being missed?

Gots to show tickets some love for them to get in. Does seem pretty easy. Moving to trunk.

The patch looks good to me for trunk.

I think we may want to do something cleverer than setting it to every hour though.

Maybe we can easily pre-compute something on the post publish hook which says how often a site is updated e.g. posts per month / hours in month

Or maybe we can expose a single ui option?

I'll get the patch in but leave this open for further discussion.

(In [8619]) Add syndication frequency recommendations to rss2 feeds. See #3513 props _ck_.

Is this fixed? The patch seems to be committed.

Yep.