Check Feed Official Status

[ianktc]

Describe the problem

In the feed submission form, contributors are given the chance to declare a feed as official or unofficial. Before we import or update the feed, we want to be able to confirm feeds either as official or unofficial.

Currently, this is done manually by:

• examining the feed email and the publisher URL to detect likelihood that it is official
• checking for known vendors/producers like trillium, swiftly, passio which indicate that it is official
• reaching out directly at the feed email asking if the feed is official in cases where it is ambiguous

Proposed solution

There are several checks that can be performed to determine a signal of whether a feed is official or not:

1. Cross reference the feed_info's feed_publisher_name, feed_publisher_url and feed_contact_email to verify domain similarity with the publisher name. In the following two examples, the domains of the feed_publisher_url and feed_contact_email both match, which indicates a likelihood of officialness.

feed_info.txt
feed_info.txt

2. Create an allow list to automatically classify feeds as official

allow list: passio, swiftly, trillium, 511

3. Cross reference the schedule feed with realtime feed and vice-versa. If the schedule feed being imported has an existing official realtime feed with a similar URL domain, we can strongly assume that the schedule feed is official as well. The opposite can also be assumed.

We can consider including this in the web-app as something that is executed immediately upon submission. Then the URL validity can be directly included in the Github issue that is created.

Alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response