RSS feeds for watchlists - Wikitech-l

12 Mar 2007

As I was stuck in a traffic jam the other day (yeah. interesting place to
think about MediaWiki stuff :P), an idea for adding RSS/Atom feed support
for watchlists (as requested on Bug 471) came to me. I have no clue how
feasible it is, so I'm just throwing the suggestion to gather comments. :)

Currently, the method the bug fixes use is to create a login cookie or
something similar for the RSS feed, which then faces authentication issues.
However, I thought it would be easier to provide a
*previously-authenticated* session token, which then is just plugged into
any feed aggregator (a la Google Calendar, to point to a similar
implementation).

The way it would be done is like this:

1) Our unhappy user wants to have a create a feed for his watchlist.

2) The user clicks on [[Special:Watchlist/feed]] (or another URL), which
then generates a random 128-character string. This URL is stored somewhere
in the database; perhaps as a user_feed_token field in the user table.

3) [[Special:Watchlist/feed]] returns the string, and gives the unhappy user
a link, of the following format:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&target={{us…
}&token={{token}}

4) The unhappy user adds the link to his aggregator.

5) The aggregator displays the watchlist.

6) The unhappy user becomes happy.

Watchlist data is obviously private; as a result, the token should be able
to be reset by the user if necessary, and only one token should be active at
any time, like it is done with email confirmation tokens. Also, the strength
of the token should be at least 128 characters, but it can be more if
necessary. I'm not sure whether to use the username or the user ID of our
happy/unhappy user; I thought the ID number would be more cryptic, but
that's minor. If the token is wrong, then the request fails gracefully; no
"wrong token error" is required.

Anyways, what do you all think? Comments? Flamebait?

Titoxd.