Over on the Fediverse I said :

My techblog used to offer Atom syndication feeds for the comments on individual entries. I just turned that off because it turns out to be a bad idea on the modern web when you have many years of entries. There are (were) any number of 'people' (feed things) that added the comment feeds for various entries years ago and then never took them out, despite those entries being years old and in some cases never having gotten comments in the first place.

DWiki , the engine behind Wandering Thoughts , is nothing if not general. Syndication feeds, for example, are a type of 'view' over a directory hierarchy, and are available for both pages and comments. A regular (page) syndication feed view can only be done over (on) a directory, because if it was applied to an individual page the feed would only ever contain that page. However, when I wrote DWiki it was obvious that a comment syndication feed for a particular page made sense; it would give you all of the comments 'under' that page (ie, on it). And so for almost all of the time that Wandering Thoughts has been in operation, you could have looked down to the bottom of an entry's page (on the web) and seen in small type 'Atom Syndication: Recent Comments' (with the 'recent comments' being a HTML link giving you the URL of that page's comment feed).

(The comment syndication feed for a directory is all comments on all pages underneath the directory.)

That's gone now, because I decided that it didn't make sense in what Wandering Thoughts has become and because I was slowly accumulating feed readers that were pulling the comment syndication feeds for more and more entries. This is exactly the behavior I should have expected from feed readers from the start; once someone puts a feed in, that feed is normally forever even if it's extremely inactive or has never had an entry. The feed reader will dutifully poll every feed for years to come (well, certainly every feed that responds with HTTP success and a valid syndication feed, which all of my comment feeds did).

(There weren't very many pages having their comment syndication feeds hit, but there were enough that I kept noticing them, especially when I added things like hacky rate limiting for feed fetching . I actually put in some extra hacks to deal with how requests for these feeds interacted with my rate limiting.)

There are undoubtedly places on the Internet where discussion (in the form of comments) continues on for years on certain pages, and so a comment feed for an individual page could make sense; you really might keep up (in your feed reader) with a slow moving conversation that lasts years. Other places on the Internet put definite cut-offs on further discussion (comments) on individual pages, which provides a natural deadline to turn off the page's comment syndication feed. But neither of those profiles describes Wandering Thoughts , where my entries remain open for comments more or less forever (and sometimes people do comment on quite old entries), but comments and discussions don't tend to go on for very long.

Of course, the other thing that this change prevents is that it stops (LLM) web crawlers from trying to crawl all of those URLs for comment syndication feeds. You can't crawl URLs that aren't advertised any more and no longer exist (well, sort of, they technically exist but the code for handling them arranges to return 404s if the new 'no comment feeds for actual pages' configuration option is turned on).