Silk Road forums

Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: HeadacheHealer on November 14, 2012, 10:22 pm

Title: Request: RSS or <1KB page to let vendors refresh (to see new msgs/orders on SR)
Post by: HeadacheHealer on November 14, 2012, 10:22 pm
As a vendor, I'm quite often clicking refresh to see if I have any new messages or orders when I'm around and can fill orders.  Unfortunately, this puts that extra load on the server and doesn't have to be necessary.  How come there aren't any RSS feeds for the site, authorized ones of course (requiring perhaps a fingerprint/hash in the url to identify the vendor and not just allow anyone to access another user's feed).  I've searched the forums and couldn't find any discussion at all about the idea.  It could even run as a separate tor service (though would need to be linked up to the same database as SR).  Could show even just something like the last 10 messages and any orders not marked as shipped, and optionally any recent feedback received in the past 24 hours (that part for vendors only, if the whole thing wasn't).  Then again, I don't know what the bottleneck here is and that info has been kept private.  If it's anything to do with server load or resource draw, well then, why not something like this.

Hell, give me a DB schema and I'll write it for you!  I make my living freelancing this kind of webdev stuff / server administration for >$100/hr (not bragging, just stating that I'm a professional; I'd obviously do it as a free service to the community!)  SQL + PHP or Perl (SR obviously uses PHP for processing things visible to the client, probably combined with a bunch of background scripts/apps running as cronjobs).  I have even made many RSS feeds for sites in the past from preexisting setups!  So, it isn't like we don't have the resources within our community.  Is there another reason something like this hasn't been developed as a feature (with the added benefit of reducing server load)?

On a related note, how do those e-book vendors automatically PM you within seconds of buying an item?  Do they have scripts refreshing SR every minute parsing the orders page for new orders?  what a server-killer!

EDIT:  Or to prevent non-tor usage (onion.to proxy service or the like), even just a page that literally has a dozen bytes of data to show if you have any pending orders not yet marked as shipped and any new messages. Screw validation for the pages!  e.g.: <h1>New... <br /> - PMs: 2<br /> - Orders: 0</h1>   -- with the right SQL query you could do it in 1!  Page could "force" a cache of minimum 5 minutes too to prevent those wild people from querying every second with a script.

Has anything lik