There are a lot of podcasts out there called “Deportes”. Or “Embedded”. Or “Interface”. For almost ten years, Panoptikum quietly assumed that this couldn’t happen: every podcast had to have a title no other podcast had. This week we finally let go of that assumption. Here is what changed, why, and what it means for your podcast.
The rule from 2016
When Panoptikum started, one feed was one podcast, and titles were nearly always distinct. So the database got a simple rule: no two podcasts may share a title. The title also became the way Panoptikum recognised a podcast when a feed was added: “do we already have a podcast with this title? Then this feed belongs to it.”
That rule caused two problems, one visible and one invisible.
Problem one: your podcast couldn’t update its details
Once a month, Panoptikum reads every feed again and updates the title, description and artwork. If your feed’s title had meanwhile become the same as another podcast’s, the database refused the whole update. Your new description and your new cover were simply not saved. Your episodes still arrived, because that’s a different process, but your podcast page slowly went out of date.
At the last count this affected 367 podcasts. The language courses of one publisher, for example, all use titles like “Eating Out” for their Italian, Chinese and Spanish versions.
Problem two: different shows got mixed up
This one was worse, because nobody noticed. When someone added a new feed and its title already existed in Panoptikum, the new feed wasn’t added as a new podcast. Its episodes were added to the existing podcast with that title.
When we went looking for this in the data, we found real cases. A Spanish sports talk show called “Deportes” contains 100 episodes of a completely different radio programme with the same title. A podcast about embedded systems contains 26 episodes of a journalism podcast that is also called “Embedded”. Most of this happened in 2017 and 2018, but the mechanism was still in place until this week. We’re sorry about that.
What changed
- Podcasts may share a title now. This is simply how the world is. If your podcast shares its title with another one, it can update its details again like any other podcast.
- Panoptikum recognises a podcast by its feed address, not by its title. When a feed is added, the only question is: do we know this exact feed address already? Only then is it the same podcast. A different show with the same title gets its own page.
- Adding a feed we already know now produces a clear message, naming the podcast it belongs to, instead of quietly doing something in the background. That way an admin always knows what happened and can decide.
What this means for you
If you only have one feed, nothing changes, except that your podcast’s details will now stay up to date even if another show uses the same title.
If you publish one feed per format (MP3, AAC, Ogg, Opus, as many Podlove users do), Panoptikum used to bundle these into one podcast, precisely because they share a title. That was useful, and it stays that way for every format feed we already know. A format feed we haven’t seen before may now show up as a second podcast for a short while. Our approach is “if in doubt, import twice”: two entries for the same show are easy to spot and to merge by hand. Two shows wrongly merged into one are not. We’re working on a better tool for finding and merging such duplicates, which will put your format feeds back together as alternatives of one podcast.
If you move your feed to a new host, please do it the usual way: a
permanent redirect (HTTP 301) from the old address to the new one, or the
<itunes:new-feed-url> tag in your feed. Panoptikum follows both. You can
also rename your podcast at the same time; that’s fine.
The special case: retiring a podcast and starting a new one
Some of you, or your publishers, end a podcast and want its listeners to follow you to your new project. A common way is to redirect the old feed to the new one. To Panoptikum, until now, that looked exactly like a move: the old podcast page simply started showing the new show’s episodes. We found one podcast that has been showing its successor’s episodes for seven years.
Here is how we’re going to tell a move from a new show. It’s a rule a human would use, too:
- The title changes, but the episodes stay the same: that’s a rename or a move. Panoptikum follows it, as before.
- The title changes and almost all the episodes are different: that’s a new podcast. Your old podcast stays in Panoptikum as it is, with its own episodes, and is not marked as dead as long as its feed still works. The new feed goes onto our list of feeds to add, and one of us looks at it before it goes live.
- Somewhere in between: we look at it by hand rather than guess.
Why not add the new podcast automatically? Because a redirect doesn’t always come from you. Domains expire and get bought by someone else, and a feed that suddenly points to a completely different show could just as well be a takeover. A quick human check protects your listeners, and your podcast’s history on Panoptikum.
The same goes for the case where a completely different show appears at your old feed address without any redirect. Panoptikum won’t silently swap your podcast’s content for it. Adding it is refused with a message, and an admin decides: if it’s you starting over in good faith, the old entry is removed and the new one added. If it’s not you, the old podcast stays as it is.
The first part of this is live: a podcast whose feed now points to another podcast in Panoptikum no longer takes over that podcast’s title and artwork. The full check for new shows is the next thing on our list.
Cleaning up
The podcasts that were already mixed up, like the “Deportes” and “Embedded” examples above, still need to be untangled. That will be done with the new duplicates tool, by hand, case by case.
If you find episodes of another show on your podcast’s page, or your podcast listed twice, please tell us at mail@panoptikum.social or on the Fediverse. It helps us find the cases our search in the data didn’t catch.