Should there be a Rust Planet?

[AndrewBrinker]

(This was initially posted on the rust-www repo issues, but it was suggested I post it here instead.)

A number of programming organizations host a “planet” blog that aggregates content from a variety of other blogs in the organization’s community. Would such a thing be desirable for Rust?

This would provide a single easy-to-follow feed for people looking for a variety of quality content from throughout the Rust community, and could also be a decent way to discover new Rust blogs. Best of all, it would involve minimal maintenance on the part of the Rust team, beyond keeping the server up, keeping the aggregation application running, and fielding requests to be added to the list of aggregated blogs.

It looks like the Planet Feed Reader is the standard software for creating this sort of site.

Any thoughts?

[josh]

I’d love to see this!

“This Week In Rust” and similar news sites could be syndicated there as well, in addition to Rust developers.

These days, I’d suggest using Planet Venus instead of the original Planet software; users of Venus include Planet Debian, Kernel Planet, planet.freedesktop.org, and Planet Mozilla.

[glaebhoerl]

I would definitely welcome this. I’ve found that reddit has wound up filling its role for me in its absence, but that’s a bit at the whim of what posts people decide to link and not as reliable.

[edunham]

Planet Planet doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2006, and Planet Venus was most recently updated in 2011. Neither appears to be maintained in any way, though Venus has a variety of years-old pull requests currently open.

I don’t think adding a Rust planet to Mozilla’s planet instance (as suggested on IRC) would be the best solution, partly because it’d increase confusion about Moz “ownership” of the project and also because the configuration can only be edited by asking a human through Mozilla’s support ticketing system.

If we get a Planet, I’ll configure it so contributors can add blogs via pull request on GitHub. Before going any further, I’d like the community team to clarify what the guidelines for which blogs are suitable to add to the planet will be.

[AndrewBrinker]

I should say that my suggestion of software was just based on a cursory examination of what is available. I have no preference for what software is used.

@glaebhoerl, I definitely agree. A planet would probably replace a lot of what I go to /r/rust for.

@edunham, handling addition of new blogs through GitHub Issues sounds like the way to go.

[josh]

Planet Planet doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2006, and Planet Venus was most recently updated in 2011.

It looks like there’s also a Planet Pluto, though I don’t know anything about it. All the planets I mentioned above seem to run Planet Venus. It does seem a bit stale, though, and I do see various personal branches around. You might ask the admins of one of the various planets what specific variant they’re running.

If we get a Planet, I’ll configure it so contributors can add blogs via pull request on GitHub.

That sounds ideal.

Before going any further, I’d like the community team to clarify what the guidelines for which blogs are suitable to add to the planet will be.

I would suggest a policy along these lines:

1. Any blog by a member of the Rust community is welcome, as are shared community-maintained news sources like This Week in Rust and similar.
2. Blogs should have at least occasional discussion of Rust, but do not need to be limited to Rust topics or tagged posts only, though people may choose to use an approach like that if they don’t want to share all of their posts with the Rust community. Part of the fun of a Planet is to see what the Rust community is up to, not just to see exclusively discussion of Rust itself.
3. All blog posts syndicated on Planet Rust must follow the Rust Code of Conduct.
4. Blogs should avoid re-syndicating numerous old posts with new dates, as often happens unintentionally when updating or reconfiguring blog software; doing so causes numerous posts to display at once, flooding the Planet and pushing out other content. (Note that intentional reposts of individual posts that have been edited or updated is fine; this is about bugs that cause large numbers of old posts to re-appear at once.)
5. Blogs syndicated on Planet Rust should have an associated contact address for the author (or author team, in the case of a community news source).
6. Blogs may be suggested by anyone, but the author of the blog must approve its addition (both to make sure they are prepared for and comfortable with the additional traffic/exposure, and to confirm that they understand the above).
7. If technical issues with a blog causes it to disrupt the rest of Planet Rust, it may be temporarily removed from syndication until the problem is resolved.

How does that sound?

[glaebhoerl]

Blogs should avoid re-syndicating numerous old posts with new dates, as often happens unintentionally

This sounds good (I’ve often been annoyed by it) but… how? Given that it’s not intentional in the first place.

[josh]

I included that one for two reasons: to remind people of the problem so they keep an eye out for it, and to go with the comment that blogs might need to be temporarily disabled if they’re disrupting the Planet.

[glaebhoerl]

OK, that makes sense.

[ato]

As a somewhat casual user and follower of Rust, I think blog syndication through a planet would be a great idea!

I subscribe to the users- and internals discussion boards by email, but the amount of content can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. I enjoy reading Planet Mozilla, but I agree with @edunham that adding it there seems a bit confusing. I’d expect to find blog posts about Servo there; not about just any Rust project.

Thank you @AndrewBrinker for suggesting this.

[AndrewBrinker]

One question to consider, particularly if the Rust Planet will require included blogs to follow the Rust Code of Conduct, is how enforcement is handled. Is the Moderation Team in charge of the Planet? Are they expected to read/review all content syndicated to the site? Is end-user reporting sufficient? Do blogs have to go through some form of approval (make sure there are prior instances of code violation on the site) before they can be syndicated?

[josh]

I would hope that the Moderation team, working with the maintainers of the Planet, would handle enforcement. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to read 100% of posts (though it wouldn’t surprise me if between them they ended up doing so naturally), but between that and user reporting (using the mechanism clearly defined in the code of conduct), hopefully any issues would get caught quickly and dealt with.

As far as approval, I think the blog owner would need to read and agree to the Planet Rust policy before the Planet Rust team would add their feed for syndication.

[AndrewBrinker]

That all sounds fair. Assuming the moderation team is alright with adding something like this to their collection of responsibilities.

[anatol]

Is there any progress with PlanetRust?

Rust is an actively developing project and has a great community. There is a lot of new things and ideas discussed all the time. Blogs are quite popular and useful source of information. But it is quite difficult to discover all the rust-related blogs. Search engines are not very helpful here. Having a blog aggregator would make easier to track rust-related blog posts.

[cuviper]

There is the unofficial http://www.planet-rust.com/

[anatol]

It is awesome. About to add it to my RSS reader.

Any plans to make it official and let other folks add their blogs to the planet?

[Vagdish]

Hi there !

I’m the maintainer of this website, and also writer of the software powering it (planetrs).

I proposed the Rust team to transfert the domain name, software code and everything they need to handle this planet themselves. They allow me to run this planet, and ask me to contact them if I plan to stop maintaining the website, so they could use it.

I will accept almost everything as a feed source. A PR is sufficient for a proposal. But sometime there are technical trouble such as non compliant feed.

Regards

[system]

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