Jalopnik
 

Did something happen to the Jalopnik feed?

Nothing since 12/3

Bump.

Seems that Autoblog is extra busy. But I prefer Jalopnik...

I looked at it for about 15 seconds the other day. The feed is still active. When the board goes to pull it, it returns an error that I have not had the time or inclination to investigate further.

I'm not sure we should bother keeping them running. A few years ago, they changed their feed to only return a few words instead of the full story, which killed much of the value of showing it here. More recently, the signal-to-noise ratio has seriously deteriorated with so many advertising/affiliate promo shopping posts and so few worth-the-time-to-look-at-car-related posts.

Most importantly, maybe, no one is looking at them any more and they are not generating any discussion. It was one thing when the STN ratio was high and the posts generated discussion, but that time is past.

I'd just as soon stop pulling all the RSS feeds.

If we stop pulling the feeds, then who's going to show us pictures of 1986 Corollas and 1992 Subaru Brats sitting on jacks in a junk yard? :ack:

Yeah, I'd vote to shut the feeds down too.

Agreed.

Maybe keep a sub-forum for news-related posts with permanent links to Jalopnik, etc.?

The only fear I have is that this being a low-transit site, despite the terrible STN, sometimes those prompt some discussions, and without them the participation may go even lower.

I'm probably just overthinking it. You'd think something would exist out there to filter RSS feeds to more focused subjects/key words?

I sure don't want to add work to anyone, so I vote for whatever is easiest. But it is a PITA to see 25 new threads and most of them being of low to no value.

I like autoblog. And it does trigger some discussions. I find Jalopnik excessively click bait, and covering stuff that has nothing to do with cars.

Seems like it should be easy to filter out some of the known useless and repetitive posts. For instance, the junkyard ones always start with "Junkyard Gem: ". I've never seen the administrative interface for vBulletin, though. Can you do filtering, or inject custom logic (PHP or JS)?

If it's worth it, I'll be happy to volunteer my time with the programming part.

We are multiple versions behind on vB. Their support for customizing RSS stuff was never great and a bit hit or miss at the time we stopped upgrading. ayn has further limits of what can be done on his box. Customization can be done, but you are forever at the mercy of those putting out the feed...and they make changes often. When we first started with it, I did some, but then stopped because it was way too much effort for the results.

If we cut the RSS stuff, I don't think it will cause a meaningful drop in use of the board. Attached are screenshots of the Jalopnik and Autoblog forums over the past year sorted by thread views. You can also see posts to those threads. Remember these things:

The first view is generated with posting and every time there's a post, at least 1 additional view is created.

Many of the posts that are worth seeing are on a topic that has a corresponding thread elsewhere, often created by someone that has blocked the RSS boards

Many of us that are still active here block the RSS boards because they're full of crap.

Basically, we're not looking at stuff there and we're not talking about stuff there. Do we really need there, there?

Clyde, I really don't care one way or the other with Jalopnik, some of their posts are crap, some not

I was more concerned that something wrong/bad was happening