As part of my workflow, I send some of my monitor articles to RSS readers and will sometimes use regex filters there to assess incoming content. The problem is the “Change Summary” section essentially becomes embedded as part of the article’s body/contents, which makes use of those filters quite difficult whenever I would also be utilizing filters within Distill (since these triggers would appear in the “Change Summary” section).
It’s also sometimes a bit of an eyesore, particularly when it would serve no beneficial purpose (for instance, when an alert would only contain a single result there would be little need to convey the matching trigger(s).
If including it could be made optional on an action/device/global level, that would be great.
@shadowmoses Thanks for taking the time to explain your workflow so clearly — we really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
You’re right in your observation: the Change Summary is currently included as part of the content sent to RSS actions, and at the moment there isn’t an option to disable or suppress it on a per-action, per-device, or global level. We understand how this can make downstream filtering (especially regex-based filtering in RSS readers) more difficult and, in some cases, visually noisy.
At this time, we’re not able to commit to changing this behavior. That said, feedback like yours is extremely valuable. We actively track feature requests and patterns in how users are using Distill, and if we hear similar requests from more users or see a broader need for this flexibility, it’s something we’d certainly consider revisiting.
Thank you again for sharing this — even when we can’t act on a request immediately, it helps inform future improvements. Please feel free to keep the ideas coming.