The issue is, I basically only get 10 posts at a time, and seemingly somewhat randomly. I’ll maybe get 20 out of every say 60 posts. It’s like every so often, I get a 10-post snapshot of whatever was most recent.
In, um, another RSS reader, I get more of the posts. Still not all, but more. Maybe 2/3.
Any thoughts on how to manage this? Obviously I’d like to keep it all in Newsblur.
I realize it may well be a Wordpress.com issue, but in that case I ask because RSS is potentially a much better way to access comments, and I wish they’d fix it. Thanks!
So, there is multiple factors in play here which results in your issue of missing comments.
The feed only contains the last 10 comments. Feeds for obvious reason can’t return every item ever made, usually the only contain the last 5-20 items. The reason you see more items in your reader is that they tend to save items when the check the feed.
As you said the site is fairly high volume, there are a lot of comments coming in. Right now the comments in the feed only span ~30 minutes.
Newsreaders such as Newsblur can’t constantly check the feed, it’d generate a lot of unnecessary traffic for both parties.
So the issue here is that often there will be more comments made between the times when Newsblur checks the feed than are contained in the feed. A bunch of comments will fall of the end of the feed and Newsblur won’t ever see them.
Newsblur specifically calculates how often a feed should be checked based on stories per month and how many people subscribe to the feed. If any of the subscribers are a premium user that weighs heavier as well.
Curiously the statistics for the feed say it should update every “15 to 18.75 minutes” but something is clearly wrong there as before I requested an insta-fetch the last check was listed as 40 minutes ago with the next in 12 minutes or so. Clearly a lot more than the listed refresh rate.
Hopefully Samuel will see this (shame we still can’t @mention on Get Sat, but he checks here a lot) and have a look at why it isn’t being fetched as often as it says, that would probably go a long way towards fixing your issue.
Another approach which I could recommend would be to contact the sites admin and ask them to increase the number of items in the feed. Unfortunately while Wordpress has an option to set the number of items in the feeds, the option applies to both feeds (entries and comments) but this shouldn’t be a problem for the site in question as the entries feed only provides summaries and not full entries. They could easily increase the item count by quite a bit.