Associated sites: Publish to different sites at once

I want to present the idea to the UNA team, programmers and companies like AQB Soft MSolutions of a new functionality that the UNA platform could have, I suppose making use of "UNA connect".

The objective is to publish content (update, discussion, post, etc.) at the same time on different sites running on the UNA platform. This would reduce the working time of a community manager who must publish the same content on different sites.

I imagine that the administrator of each site would have to have a place where he could configure the related or associated sites. So, at the moment when a site member wants to publish content, he could optionally indicate that it is also published on other sites, selecting those where he wants to publish.
I'm not sure if this functionality should be accessible to standard level members, maybe just administrators or contentmen.
Regards.

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Replies (4)
    • This is usually referred to as "syndicated content", and the common protocol for it is RSS. 

      There is a good reason for duplicating content via RSS rather than automated reposting. Google and other search engines need to know the origin of any original content to attribute it correctly. They can not rely on meta data or reported schema, so they have to rely on date of initial crawl. If you post original content to multiple sites at once, Google can potentially pick up any one of them as "origin" and attribute all other as "duplicates". In all likelihood it would be getting pretty confused about which site is indeed the main site. Also, all satellite sites are likely to trigger penalties for high proportion of duplicate content. RSS avoids that problem by loading content from the origin and attributing it in a verifiable way - so users see this content on-site, but Google know that it's loaded from elsewhere. 

      Unfortunately RSS and content syndication is not very popular anymore, in part because of specifications wars, but mostly because modern social networks introduced so much user-curated sharing that reading syndicated channels is no longer as engaging as reading say, Twitter feed. There was a good article on this in Vice last year - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss 

      So, all in all... I would probably look into engaging your satellite sites communities to cross-share interesting content with added comments and direct links, rather than intorducing some form of automated double-posting.

      • Thanks Andrew Boon
        I understand but I consult you. Is this valid for closed social networks like mine?

        To give an example: unlike una.io in my networks the discussions are not accessible to unregistered users and I suppose (perhaps wrongly) that Google does not have access either.

        I wonder how the applications that allow managing different social profiles from one place, such as Hootsuite for example, will do.
        Interesting article.
        Regards.

        • google knows everything.  it's plugged into the data sharing metrics with DARPA.   every single piece of internet traffic worldwide, flows through DARPA's server system.  it is the top of the food chain in terms of touching all files that happen on / through / over / under / above / below / --inside-- the internet.
          the internet in general is largely mis-understood. it's a distributed system of many computers but with centralized nodal points, that facilitate and regulate and manage the flow of information. at the base of that mesh of "the internet" is the DARPA servers and their systems.
          thats what happens when you invent something, and build it so you always have access.
          nothing you do on the internet is private, ever, really, but that's not even the point :)
          if you ask me, we are inside a black hole, and created the internet as a means to communicate a bit better in a singularity event, but this would take me a while to describe here.... and is another layer to the cake, as it were. :)
          but google knows whatever it needs to know, or wants to know, because it is a creation of the defense industry and DARPA is a part of the defense industry. :)
          defense from whom?  well, another story entirely, but its not from other people.  😁😆🙂🙃🙃🙃

          with deference to your original question, hower - Andrew already hit the nail on the head.  I just wanted to throw this extra pickles in for fun.

          • Apps like Hootsuite or Buffer allow people to post one piece of content to multiple social media platforms. It's a user-level automation tool really. Say, you write something and connect your Twitter and Facebook account to HS or Buffer, and post to both. Twitter and FB don't directly share this and have no cross-posting between them - for them you're basically posting just like any other user. 

            As a community operator it's a bit different - if you're trying to post one item to multiple sites it may be tricky - think of situations like users not having correct permissions on different sites, or not being able to choose contexts, or contexts don't match, etc. I assume your sites are not exact clones of each other, so there may be quite a few considerations. Perhaps we need to look more closely at the task at hand. 

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