Frequently Asked Questions:

If you have a question or suggestion, please leave your feedback by roasting this page. This page is a censored topic, and if your question/suggestion is legitimate, the operator will reply to you and possibly update this page.

Why is my topic not roastable?

In technical terms, a web page has to be in UTF-8 encoding, served with HTTPS with standard port, is readable by the general public, or cannot serve as a topic. We will also perform URL canonicalization, so the URLs and the topics have a one to one mapping. Currently, Roastidious looks at og:url meta tag (see open graph standard), failing that, will look at rel=canonical link (see Google help article). If none of them is present, Roastidious will stripe off the query string. So if your URL has to have a query string to function, please add one of the above tags to preserve it.

The URL canonicalization is performed in the backend, without a javascript engine. Therefore, some web pages that do not disclose anything, not even a title, without some javascript magic are not roastable. Some notable examples include tweets on Twitter.

What is credit, and why should I care?

For casual and well-behaving users, credit should not become a problem. It is there to limit abuse. All users have an initial balance of 100 credits, and some actions withhold one credit for different length of period. Explicitly, a “speechless” withholds one credit for 12 hours. A “roast” on a censored node withholds one credit for up to 30 days, or until the owner of the node pinned you. For ownerless nodes, a “roast” withholds one credit for 12 hours. One may also temporarily “earn” credit due to the action of others.

All “spent” or “earned” credit will come back or go away after some time, so nothing will have a lasting effect. If your balance drops to 0, you won’t be able to comment and have to wait until some of your credit comes back. If you did a lot of “speechless” and found yourself with zero balance, you can use some sleep. If your “roasts” are not getting pinned, you probably should rethink your roasting style.

What are bags?

Bags are collections of topics. Each member on each device (computer, phone, etc) maintain one bag locally; so they can add/remove topic to the bag. The bag’s contents are encoded in the URL to the bag itself. The main purpose of bags is to facilitate sharing, especially sharing to the general public via external means, such as social media. Once shared, the bag’s contents are fixed; any operation to your bag afterwards will not affect the the contents of the shared bag link.

There is no upper limit to the number of topics in the bag, or the number of shared bag. Topics in a bag will expire as usual. You can “Bag” any topics that you already participate, visit the bag by clicking the “Bagged” button in the top right corner, and empty the bag if you want to. A non-member can view the bag’s contents but not the comments; clicking the topic will prompt login.

What is “FIND TOPICS”?

All topics ever found by some members can be found here. It will show a truly random selection when you click it; then you can enter a query to find the topics you like to read and roast. The query syntax is very simple: A query like Joe Biden means any topics that contains Joe or Biden. To seach for Joe and Biden, you have to use +Joe +Biden. Or you can search for "Joe Biden", which means any topics with Joe and Biden in consequtive positions. Any search term can also be limited to a particular field, eg: title:Term or site:Term. We distinguish 3 fields: title, body and site.

There is no secret ranking, paid inclusion or user profiling; we don’t even know how. Only the top 100 results are shown. To refine your query, please use more terms with the + sign in front.

What is “public feed”?

All topics that you currently participate in can also be exported as an RSS feed with which your friends can be updated. We humbly recommend the sister project of Roastidio.us, Airss, but any feed readers can be used. Your personal info is ommited from the feed to protect your privacy. One do not need to login to read the feed.

The public feed functionality defaults to off. You can enable it yourself by clicking your avatar at the top of any page, then click on the button that says enable public feed. Then you can copy off the URL to share with your friend. You can turn it back off anytime and the feed will be disabled.

“public feed” and “bags” can both be used to share multiple topics. The differences are: A bag is static; the content cannot change after you shared the link. Also, you can make as many as possible bags to share with different people. On the other hand, your public feed is dynamic; and it will follow your actions from now on. Also you can only have one public feed. Please choose wisely to suit your needs.

What are tags?

Tags are short text labels that can be added to a topic for later tag based queries. The initial tags are gathered from the feed source via the RSS2 category tags or the web page source via article:tag OpenGraph metas. Commentors can also add tags using hash tags such as #interesting in the comment. A hash tag must be saperated with spaces from the comment text. Right now, only the top level comments to a uncensored topic can add tags; a tag will live for a month.

Which one to subscribe, the original feed or the webspace feed?

For any webspace, you can subscribe via RSS in one of two ways: You can subscribe the original feed by clicking the subscrbe button from any topic within the webspace, or you can click the webspace link and then subscribe to the webspace feed. The result would be similar. The original feed is published by the operator of the said webspace and has nothing to do with us. The webspace feed is published by us, based on data collected from the original feed and other users’ interaction with us. So which one to choose? It is up to you; however we recommend to use the original feed, unless the original feed is missing or unusable, for the sake of authenticity.