Please Clap: "The RSS Situation" Should Be Fixed (Patreon)

Greetings and good evening, specifically to you and you alone.As you no doubt recall, we made profound changes to our RSS feed structure last month. To sum things up in short, we joined an alpha test here on Patreon to deploy individual RSS feeds for our various shows, something we (well, I) had assumed for years was a major ask amongst our paying audience. But it wasn't a clearly thought-out plan, and it didn't account for the many users who liked the status quo just fine. In fact, it kinda mucked-up their entire experience.Before I get into the nuts-and-bolts, I'll just come out and say it: Our RSS feed structure is now 'fixed' and will accommodate both types of users, those who want a la carte feeds only for the shows they opt-in for, and traditional-style users who liked it all in a single moon-emblazoned feed. (If you don't yet see this full run of options, give it a day or two, as it could be [and likely is] that things are still rolling out more widely.)If you're unfamiliar with RSS, don't know how to find links to add to your podcast app, or have other questions, everything about Patreon's RSS functionality can be found here and here. Please read the links if you are having trouble, as it's fairly certain that your issue will be remedied within.When you now go to Last Stand's Patreon RSS list (pictured within), you'll see the best of both worlds: Each of our shows available individually, and then a so-called "Combined Feed" that will incorporate everything we publish to any RSS feed. In other words, the Combined Feed acts as exactly what you had until mid-February. Thus, for those that want it all, have it all. For those that want access to only individual shows, select your poison(s). There's an important caveat: Since we treated our old, core RSS feed as the Sacred Symbols feed beginning last month (so as to limit movement around our flagship show), that feed may now revert for you back to being the Combined Feed. In other words, if you're an a la carte enjoyer and listen to Sacred Symbols, you may need to re-add a fresh Sacred RSS link to your podcast app. Likewise, if you're a Sacred Symbols enjoyer and fear the unified feed, you may find that you have to opt into a fresh RSS link for Sacred Symbols. At this early hour, it's unclear to us what's happening on this front, but we see this as being the only sticking point. So please be aware that you may need to make a couple of moves, should you see any funkiness with the way things are published from here on out.Before I part, I also wanted to speak on something else. The decision to make these changes to our RSS feeds was mine, and it was a profoundly poor one, undoubtedly one of the dumber things I've done as a business owner, CEO, and corporate steward. As I explained when we rolled these alterations out, complaints about our unified RSS feed easily constituted the single most-received piece of feedback we garnered on Patreon, going all the way back to 2018, when we first published multiple shows. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of individual complaints, easily. But over the years, I began to not only internalize that feedback, but also worked fastidiously to get Patreon to change things. I never really considered the other side of the coin. So when Patreon finally approached me after years of begging and said they were ready to try it, I accepted the offer without a second thought. This was obviously a mistake, one that annoyed a lot of people, and even cost us some business. I'm not perfect and never claimed to be, so I can accept defeat. I'm truly blessed and won't spend too much time crying over spilt milk. But I did want to apologize for the needlessness of it all. I thought I was delivering on something monumental for our paying audience. If I didn't, I would have never made a change at all.There's another side of the coin, though, in that your feedback (while occasionally dramatic and maybe even a little vitriolic) was essential in alerting Patreon as to the need of a 'global' feed that would solve all of our problems. It sucks to have to 'test' things on our audience, but I guess that's the entire point of alphas and betas to begin with. No one really understood (or even really considered) that this would be a problem, and in hindsight, that's kind of crazy. But we just didn't know. Now we do. So all should be well. For all of the tests Patreon has run on LSM over the years (some of which you aren't even aware of), this is the only one that's gone south for us. I take total responsibility for that. I'm sorry.Anyway, all should now be well, and RSS options for you to peruse overfloweth.Thanks for reading, as well as for your support and patience. Be well. -Colin