Flag a feed for DELETION

[thebells1111]

Have we considered a way to automate feed deletion as opposed to asking one of the Index custodians to remove a feed? Something as simple as <podcast:txt>DELETE</podcast:txt> in the feed could be read by the parser and trigger the feed for deletion.

[theDanielJLewis]

While I can appreciate the concept, I think it might be unnecessary. If someone wants their feed completely unavailable, they can "delete" the feed URL and the apps can remove the feed after some number or time of repeated failures.

That's how many of the feeds get removed/deactivated from Apple Podcasts every day.

[picard102]

Returning a 410 response would probably be the least complex route.

[daveajones]

What would the DELETE be expected to do? Just remove from directories or more complete than that?

[theDanielJLewis]

If people are leaving their feeds on CDNs, then they're not going to add any kind of "delete" tag.

Apple cleans up their catalog by removing podcasts that have no episodes in the feed, the feed fails repeatedly, or sometimes when all the episodes fail to download (though I have yet to document that for sure).

[thebells1111]

I don't really care how Apple does anything. I'm just trying to save some hassle for the Podcast Index guys that get asked to remove feeds from the Podcast Index when someone double posts their feed in two locations and wants one of them removed. This is simply an idea to save those guys a bit of time and effort.

[picard102]

I've seen several musicians hosting their own feeds that don't want a duplicate album in the Index when they change hosting solutions

They should be redirecting the feed.

[thebells1111]

They sometimes can't. If they host their feeds on something like Digital Oceans Spaces they don't have the ability to control redirects. There's absolutely no reason for them to need to host a separate server just to handle a redirect when we can easily add something in the feed to indicate that this is a now a dead feed.

I think what everyone is failing to realize is this is a problem that pops up 2 or 3 times a month for the Podcast Index team where someone asks them to go in and delete a feed manually. All the solutions being offered aren't working 2 or 3 times a month. I'm not asking for a new tag, I'm asking if the Index wants to use an existing tag that saves their maintenance team from doing manually something that could be done automatically.

[picard102]

That doesn't seem like a significant amount of requests to necessitate this, especially on a single platform. There seems to be a number of ways to deal with this already that have been outlined here.

[thebells1111]

I thought of another use case. Say I'm a music app, and I'm letting users create playlists to share songs using something like podcast:medium=musicL, and I want to be able to let the user delete the play list. I want it to be as quick as possible, not waiting for a bunch of redirects and failed downloads and stuff. I want to add a DELETE flag to the feed, podping the Index, query the Index 90 seconds later, verify the feed is removed, then delete the feed from my database. Now all the music apps also have the feed deleted, just as the user intended, and I'm not getting tech support questions the next day asking why the playlist is still showing up in a different app.