OK, so it looks like a couple people* in the community are not happy with the new "descriptions" feature. They are of course entitled to their own opinions, but I will NOT be removing this feature.

And nor should you; my argument was for more choice not less so that the reader could choose. Of course publishers have every right to make their content available in any way they see fit.

I have made it 100% optional. In fact, in the admin section, it actually says "OPTIONAL". I am not sure why this has become such an issue. If you don't like a blog using it, don't read it. Will some people stop reading a particular blog if the blogger chooses to use them? Maybe, but I guess it depends on the quality of the blogger.

Well, I've never seen the admin section so I wouldn't know about that. If occasional posts are long enough that it works better to have a description that links to them then that seems reasonable, although in my mind there is a fundamental distinction between these captured by "post" vs. "story" in many systems.

I personally am quite bothered by the, "I will take my ball and go home attitude" if this continues and the assumption that this is some how related to showing ads on the blogs, which is completely ridiculous. If you could always have it "your way", I would have received a pingback or trackback about these posts and not had to hear about it through IM and email. :D

This isn't the way that I would portray the argument and it has nothing to do with showing ads. It's the reality of life in a world where we are so overloaded with information. I have so many competing calls for my attention from closed circulation industry press to magazines, mailing lists, news groups, web sites and blogs that I simply don't have enough time to read everything I'd like to. Full RSS feeds are a way to maximise my reading time and to look at feeds when I wouldn't otherwise have web access.

I appreciate the goal of driving community by having people visit the site to enable them to see and add comments and other links. There's always a dilemma about whether you should add a comment on someone's site or write your own blog entry. I guess pingback and trackback try to work towards solving some of these issues [apologies for not being sophisticated enough to be using either of them ;o)]. I know some people publish RSS feeds for their comments too.

I am frequently tempted to remove comments from my site because I think they have dubious added value. I think that if and when I reach the point where I can record referrers and maybe try to understand these pingback and trackback things that they may disappear.

"As an end-user, I really prefer RSS feeds that have distinct abstracts in their <description> elements rather than just blasting the content in there." [ Don Box]

Yes. I think it really is an end-user preference as Don suggests (okay, I'm being a little disingenuous reading it that way, but...). If I had an RSS aggregator for my Smartphone then I probably would want abstracts then too. I think it depends who, what, and where you are reading.

I have been giving some thought about this recently. I am going to release an optional "short-description" feature tonight that I hope everyone will use for posts longer than a sentence or two. (instead of the full post text appearing in the feed, only the short-description will appear). 

...but I personally want to see the number of page views vs. Rss feed hits even out a little more. Syndirella, Newsgator, etc are all great, but they do take away (just a little) from the community. My hope is people will read a post, make a comment or two, check out the referrals/pingbacks/trackbacks and all of the other links that float around .NET Weblogs.

Sitting back using your favorite aggreator is nice, but you are definetly missing out on the "full community" here. (NOTE: more on this later). [ScottW's ASP.NET WebLog]

I really hope this option will be selectable by the reader rather than the blogger. One of the reasons that I am a fan of RSS based news aggregation is that it gives me the opportunity to read posts without having to visit the individual sites to read what people have written.

Often, I will do an RSS download first thing in the morning and then be able to read the posts later in the day when I might not have Internet connectivity such as on a train or working away from the office.

Of the feeds that I subscribe to, only a small handful have abbreviated feeds that give only an introduction to each post and these are the ones where I only read an occasional article. If all the feeds that I currently subscribe to from dotnetweblogs.com went this way, that would be a whole load of content from a bunch of interesting people that I wouldn't get to read.