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Frequently Asked Questions

• What does Feed Foo mean?
• Why do you need my email address?
• What is your privacy policy?
• How do I rate feed entries?
• Which feedreader programs are supported?
• How do I update my current feed subscriptions to use Feed Foo?
• Why did you make Feed Foo?
• How does the rating system work?
• What is the “Default Viewing Threshold”?
• Do you support authenticated (private) feeds?
• What does ‘Remember Me’ mean when I login?
• Why aren’t my feeds being filtered?
• Are these really frequently asked questions?
• I have a question not answered here.

What does Feed Foo mean?

1. It’s like Kung Fu for your feeds — a combination of Bruce Lee’s One-Inch Punch and a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the side of the head; it eliminates all but the strongest entries among your feeds and does other cool but unspecified stuff.
2. Foo is a metasyntactic variable, or a placeholder.
3. feedfoo.net was an available seven-letter domain name containing feed.

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Why do you need an email address?

• The only reason we ask for an email address is in case you forget your username or password. Having your email address on file allows us to send you an email with a link to reset your password.
• If you’re still hesitant to give out your email address, we recommend the excellent spamgourmet for disposable email addresses.
• (If you happen to know of a user-friendly way to provide reset capability without requiring an email address, please let us know. We hate giving email address ourselves, and would rather not require an email address.)

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What is your privacy policy?

• Don’t ask, don’t tell! Just kidding. The policy is simple: we’ll never share any of your information with anybody else, period.
• It’s possible that in the future we might implement new features that, for example, display summary or aggregate information about the feeds or entries that people rank highest, but this would only be done in a way that included absolutely no personally identifiable information.

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How do I rate feed entries?

• At the bottom of each feed entry, you’ll see two little buttons, as in the following image:
  
• Click the red one to rate an entry down, or the green one to rate it up (or do neither). If you enter more than one rating for a given entry, the last rating is the one that ‘wins’.
• If you don’t see the buttons, double-check that the URL you are using for the feed is a URL that begins with http://feedfoo.net/. If it doesn’t, you’re fetching the original feed from its original source, and you’re not using Feed Foo, so nothing will be filtered and you won’t be able to rate feed entries. In this case, you need to go through this process to use Feed Foo.

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Which feedreader programs are supported?

• Any feedreader that supports the Atom 1.0 feed format (practically all of them) and HTML links for rating purposes is supported. Additionally, it is much more convenient if the program allows you do a bulk export/import of your feeds, since all of the URLs will change, so you need to be able to export your existing feeds, use our converter to update them, and then re-import them again into your feed reading program. The table below illustrates the various levels of support of the programs I’ve been able to test. Please let us know if you have information about an unlisted feedreader program that does or does not support each of the required features or if you believe any of the information below is inaccurate.
• What you are looking for in order to get the most from Feed Foo is that the program supports HTML links properly (green in first column, this makes it quick and easy to rate feed entries), and that it fully supports import/export of feeds via OPML (green in the second column; this makes it simple to convert all your feed URLs into the Feed Foo format and re-import them back into your feedreader program).

Feedreader	Feedback Links	OPML Export/Import
Bloglines	Full Support	Full Support [1]
Newshutch	Full Support	Full Support
Firefox + Sage [2]	Full Support	Full Support
Newsgator Online	Full Support	Full Support
Blogbridge	Partial Support [3]	Full Support
Google Reader	Partial Support [3]	Full Support
Netvibes	Partial Support [3]	Full Support
Firefox w/o Sage	Full Support	Unsupported
Thunderbird	Partial Support [3]	Full Support
Opera Mail	Partial Support [3]	Unsupported
Rojo	Full Support	Full Support
(KDE) Akgregator	Full Support	Full Support
(Gnome) Epiphany	Full Support	Unsupported

Criteria for Full Support:

• Feedback Links: full support means that it renders the links and that when the link is clicked there is no change in focus of the user agent, meaning that the program doesn’t try to open the link in a new tab or new page (this is the correct behavior since the page at the other end link returns an HTTP 204 ‘no content’ status code).
• OPML Export/Import: full support means that the program provides a way of exporting all your current feeds in the standard OPML format, and a way of re-importing the feeds after feed foo has converted them for you.

Notes:

1. Fully supported. However, Bloglines sometimes takes a long time to show new feeds. I’ve had to wait up to half a day or so before they all show up. This would only happen the first time, and it should work fine after that. I read my 200+ feeds through bloglines and have had no problems after they eventually showed up the first time.
2. Sage is an RSS and Atom feedreader extension for Firefox. See here for more information.
3. Partially supported, but the feedreader incorrectly changes focus or opens a new blank page in response to HTTP 204 (no content) code. You will probably find this too annoying to use.

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How do I update my current feed subscriptions to use Feed Foo?

1. Export your current feed subscriptions from your current feedreader, saving them as an OPML. (OPML the standard format for exporting and importing feed subscriptions and is supported by most feed readers.)
2. Use the converter to update the subscriptions for use with Feed Foo; the converter will prompt you for where to save an updated OPML file.
3. Remove all your current subscriptions from your current reader, and then import the updated subscriptions using the new OPML file into your existing feed reader.
4. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be subscribed to the same feeds, but they will be accessed via Feed Foo. Next time you access your feeds, you should see two buttons (green and red) at the bottom of each feed entry, to rate the entry up or down. (See this answer for an example of what the buttons look like.)

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Why did you make Feed Foo?

• The short answer is that I subscribe to many more feeds than I have time to read, and plenty of them are a mix of good and bad articles. I’ve often wished for something like a slashdot-style filtering system for feeds that would allow me to see only the most highly rated feed entries and avoid the rest, and I thought perhaps there were enough other people out there in the same situation that it would be worthwhile to create Feed Foo.

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How does the rating system work?

• Every feed entry starts out life with a rating of 0. Voting an entry up adds 1 to the score, while voting an entry down subtracts 1 from the score.
• Don’t worry much about the ratings. And don’t feel you need to rate everything. It’s perfectly fine to just vote up what you think are the very, very best entries now and then, and to vote down only things like the occassional spam.

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What is the “Default Viewing Threshold”?

• The default viewing threshold is the minimum average rating that a rated feed entry must have in order for you to view it (i.e., for it not to be filtered). A feed entry starts life with a score of 0, and gets 1 point added or subtracted for every up or down vote, respectively. The default viewing threshold is 0, which means you’ll see all entries that have at least as many up votes as down (as well as all entries that don’t have enough votes yet).
• What should I set my threshold to? This depends on how many entries you wish to filter. You might start with 0 (the default), and after a while, try bumping it up a couple of points if you wish to see fewer, higher-rated entries.

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Do you support authenticated (private) feeds?

• No. The primary purpose of Feed Foo is to provide filtering and suggestions based on user ranking of feed entries for which there are lots of readers.
• Private feeds, by their nature, have a much smaller user base, and so there is less point in using Feed Foo to read these feeds, as there wouldn’t be enough ratings for it to be useful. You can keep on accessing private feeds the same as you do already by just not including those feeds in the OPML file that you upload.

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What does ‘Remember Me’ mean on the login page?

• If you check ‘Remember Me’ when you login, you won’t be asked to login again for 2 weeks.
• In order for this to work, you have to allow us to set a persistent cookie (in case you block cookies). Any time you visit again within 2 weeks, we’ll see that you’ve already authenticated by checking the cookie, and won’t force you to login again. After 2 weeks, you’ll be asked to login again. Don’t use ‘remember me’ on a public computer, since that would allow other people to use your account without logging in. If at any time you wish to delete the cookie (so you’ll have to supply your username and password again), just logout and it will be deleted.

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Why aren’t my feeds being filtered?

• Feeds are not filtered at all until they have a certain minimum number of votes, in order to prevent initial votes from having too great an influence. This means that until there are a sufficient number of users, most entries will not have enough ratings, so they will not be filtered. With more users, more entries will start to have ratings, and then you should see fewer entries in your feeds as lower rated entries are filtered (depending on your “default viewing threshold”).

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Are these really frequently asked questions?

• If by frequently you mean at least once, and if by asked you mean asked by me, then yes, they absolutely are.

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I have a question not answered here.

• You may send us an email with any other questions you have, and we’ll answer them and add them to this list if they’d be relevant to other people too.

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