RSS Feed dead?

So…

When am I getting the trophy?

The feed itself wasn’t the issue, it was the API that backed it that was also public and could (and was) hit by bad actors to break cache. In order to fix RSS, we’d need to migrate to the new internal API and then basically rebuild it. Given the number of people who used it, we could not justify the work above other priorities. We have a small dev team, and there’s a lot of stuff to fix still. Obviously we don’t WANT to lose traffic and customer hits through this channel. None of these decisions are made lightly.

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You CLEARLY need this in your life:

c79c41ea-d3ea-4318-8721-5c5e3e9dcd2a b87d692b-fe85-4321-9eef-50ce478037ae

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image

This is disappointing and frustrating. I live by my RSS feeds. The internet is too big a place to visit every site individually every day. The API is absolutely not a substitute for the RSS feed. An API is of zero use or value to 99.999% of the people who simply use RSS feeds to stay on top of things.

Case in point? I haven’t bought anything from Woot since you disabled the RSS feed… because it doesn’t appear on my overall dashboard, so like the other person said: a site without an RSS feed might as well not exist for me.

I cannot fathom how RSS feeds could possibly be so technically difficult that Woot couldn’t implement them. They have been table stakes for most CMSes for eons now and any quality one has it baked in as an automatic feature already. Most others have it as an option through a plug-in or add-on, often written by some kid in his parents’ basement. I would think such skills would also be within the abilities of at least one person on Woot’s staff or someone on Amazon’s 700K employee list.

Did you read the explanation given by @wajeremy?

He knows a couple of things regarding the technical aspects.

I’ve never used an RSS feed. I think. Not even sure how to do it. What have I been missing all my life?

I use IF(TTT) to notify me when certain RSS feeds have new posts.

Which comes great when the tech site I look at has new posts.

Not so great if a deal site would decide to have a new item every 15 minutes. (Though I don’t use this anymore.) Though, to be fair, I sometimes wouldn’t get THOSE notifications until several listings later.

I love when people think Amazon developers are available to us in Woot in any way, let alone that they’d devote their time and energy to a feature used by less than 0.5% of Wooters. I would just like it if they fixed our auth linking so our customers with broken Amazon prime accounts could relink them. But we all live in hope.

The sad fact is our RSS feed is kind of like Google Reader was. Those that loved it, LOVED it, but there just aren’t enough devotees to spend the time to resurrect it at this time. It isn’t hard to do, but it is work to do, and the boffins that look at the backlog and decide what we should focus on sayeth “the opportunity cost is too damn high”.

THAT SAID! You can get pretty much similar functionality through our forum now. Any url in this forum can have .rss added to it and you can get a daily deal RSS for all new deals as thus:

https://forums.woot.com/c/deal-chatter.rss

for example.

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Well maybe if it worked…