Frequently Asked Questions

General

Why use Auctorial?

Auctorial allows you to follow you favourite Authors, no matter where they write on the web. Many Journalists, Authors, Writers, and Bloggers write on a number of different websites, and it can be difficult to keep track them all. We aim to do that for you, so you never miss out on a great piece of writing.

We also find it useful to filter out articles written by Authors you’re not interested in following. Instead of going to a Website or subscribing to an RSS feed and having to scroll past articles you aren’t interested in, we deliver the relevant articles directly to you.

How do you notify me of new articles?

There are three options for reading the articles written by the Authors you follow.

An Author isn't on Auctorial

Auctorial only includes Authors that we've found in the RSS feeds that our users have added. If you'd like to follow an Author but they don't appear on Auctorial, then you'll need to add feeds from the websites where they are published.

To do this, go to the Add Feeds page, and enter the URLs for the sites or feeds you'd like us to subscribe to. Click the Search for Feeds button, and we'll search the site for RSS feeds. A list of feeds will then appear. Click the Subscribe button on each feed that you think might be relevant. We will then start following the feed, and if the Author appears in the feed they will be added to our database.

If an Author publishes articles infrequently, they won't be added to our database until the next time they publish and article.

An article from an Author was missed

From time to time, we may miss articles from an Author that you follow. The most likely cause is that an article was published in a feed that we are not subscribed to. If you think this is the case, you can add the feed on the Add Feeds page.

It may also be the case that we received the article, but that we did not recognise the correct Author for the article. Different websites format Author names in different ways, and while we are continually improving our algorithms for identifying the correct Author, this is something that will likely never be 100% correct.

Privacy

Auctorial accounts are completely private, the only personal data we require is an email address for account registration and login.

We do not and will not sell personal data.

However, like many other sites we do use Google Analytics to track page views.

Each user has a personal RSS feed, which by default is private, requiring your login details to access. If you set your personal RSS feed to be public, then anyone with the URL of your feed will be able to see which Authors you follow.

Security

Auctorial uses HTTPS for secure communication between our servers and your web browser. While we do our best to remove any potentially compromising HTML and Scripts from the feeds we receive, feeds may still contain external links to images and other insecure content.

Your user password is stored using bcrypt for hashing, which makes it hard to crack even if someone obtains a copy of the Auctorial database.

Copyright

Auctorial is an aggregator of RSS feeds, which by definition includes copyrighted content from the feed's website. We only include content that has been made public directly from the feed, and do not scrape websites for further content. All article titles contain links that point back to the original content on the originating website.

Modifications to the content of the feeds we receive include removing potentially dangerous HTML and Script elements, extraneous styling, and empty HTML elements. We do not modify the content of the articles themselves, except to provide a summary with a link back to the full article on the originating website.

We believe that this is no different from any other RSS aggregator, and should be compatible with copyright and fair use law.

If you are the administrator of a website and believe we are misusing your feeds, then you can contact us at support@auctorial.com.