A few days ago, @florianziegler suggested that all of us running blogs with RSS feeds make a small change:
Please add your email address to your RSS feed.
Add Your Email Address to Your RSS Feed
This email address can be used by RSS feed readers to display an Email button next to each feed entry, so folks can reply to the post via email instead of visiting the post on your site to leave a comment.
That seems like a good idea. I found that there was no WordPress plugin that allowed that out of the box, so I built my own. If you’re a blogger and use WordPress, give it a try!
Next step will be for more feed readers to support that issue. I consequently opened an issue for my feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire, to support this, and another for the Android app I use, FocusReader. If you use a different feed reader, don’t hesitate to contact them about it!
@jeremy @florianziegler Hmm… would it be fair to think of this as an extension of the Post by Email concept, but in the form of Comment by Email, somewhat analogous to how an ActivityPub handle works?As far as I know, WordPress Core doesn’t natively support SMTP out of the box…
No, it’s quite different. All communication happens outside of WordPress. The email button appears in your RSS reader, and clicking it opens your email client of choice. The emails are not sent via WordPress.
@jeremy Hmm, in that case, it sounds more like a one-on-one conversation or a kind of private comment concept.
@jeremy @cdevroe @florianziegler Ouch. That is the LAST feature I want in my RSS feeds. I WANT blog comments, I want public discussions. I do not want MORE email. I already get too much.
@mlanger @jeremy @cdevroe I love getting email from people as replies to my posts. I’ve had the most wonderful conversations via email, probably especially because they were not public. 🙂
@florianziegler @jeremy @cdevroe I get way too much email. I honestly cannot spend time chatting via email with strangers who read my blog.
I would also prefer for discussion to happen in the open, in one place, on my site. That’s something I really like since I connected my blog to the Fediverse: I’m having conversations on my site again!
But sometimes folks may not feel comfortable doing that, or may offer different comments in a private discussion.
I guess I like both options. Both have their use!
@jeremy @florianziegler that’s only a good idea if you like receiving spam. Otherwise it’s a terrible idea.
@jeremy @florianziegler Great idea. It has reminded me though how bad the wp-admin add plugin search facility is though. Even with exact name match on search it was so far down the page
Yeah, I got that too. I think that’s because I just released it and not that many people are using it on their site yet. Once it gets a bit more popular it should appear higher in search results.
Although I would still expect exact name searches to display the plugin first in the results!
@jeremy This is a problem that could easily be fixed. Until then, people need to put the exact plugin name inbetween quotation marks for it to show up as the first result 😦 https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2642#comment:43
Thanks for the link, subscribed!
That’s most likely something that cannot be fixed easily, otherwise it would be fixed already! 😄