Feed Aggregators, such as Google Reader, keep backlogs of (RSS\/Atom) feed data. This enables a reader to see a long history of a blog, while the feed producer and consumers can save CPU and bandwidth by transferring only a relatively short feed history in what is – for many sites -the most popular page served.<\/p>\n
Despite the best efforts of Spam Karma 2, sometimes spam comments get posted to this blog. Normally, I am fairly quick to squash them, and they are deleted within 12 hours.<\/p>\n
Google Reader (amongst others) contacts my blog more often than once every 12 hours.<\/p>\n
Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 = Spam comments get added to my comments feed, and never get removed.<\/p>\n
I have understood this problem for a while, and yesterday I set out to patch it.<\/p>\n
The obvious solution is not to entirely eradicate<\/em> spam comments, but to replace them with a stub in the feed that says “Item Id=XYZ is NULL, so skip it.” This could then override the previous value for Item Id=XYZ in the Google Reader cache.<\/p>\n I believe that this might work in Atom, but not in RSS, because Atom has a GUID field, while RSS doesn’t. <\/p>\n So, off I went to check on the official WordPress solution for the problem. No<\/a> luck<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, off I went to check for a WordPress plugin that would solve it. I didn’t find one, but that doesn’t prove much, because there are so many<\/a>.<\/p>\n