Proposal: “No Show Today” Item

[stuartjmoore]

This isn’t a new tag proposal, but a best practices idea.

“No Show Today” episode items would be an <item> tag with no <enclosure> audio or video file; simply an item describing not to expect a new episode where you normally would with an optional explanation why. This would help solve the problem (I’m sure a lot of podcasters face) of being flooded with confused emails and tweets.

Perfectly valid in the existing spec, but I doubt any apps or podcasters support such a method.

[theDanielJLewis]

Perhaps it could be a way to suggest a text post to appear in podcast apps. So it could be for any kind of announcement that, for some reason, you have to put out in text instead of audio.

What would you imagine the app experience to be like? For example, if I'm going through a playlist of episodes and there's a text post in the middle, what should happen in the app? What should happen to the listening experience?

I'm concerned something like this could really hurt the user experience and frustrate the user.

[todduk]

Is there a chance this could be use for ads or spamming if it allowed free-form text? I'm not that familiar with the standard just yet, but thinking about usability and @theDanielJLewis thoughts, maybe it could be a tag that signified that no episode was scheduled for this time, with no possibility to enter any other text/link. That way the implementation is down to the application itself; there could be a link to the podcasts site or just a short piece of text with no interactivity at all. Of course if some text was allowed the implementation could decide to display it or show a 'cancelled' message etc.