It is unfortunate, and, in my opinion--though I don't want to be insulting, honestly--sort of silly. I can certainly understand not wanting to RSS the comic itself, that makes perfect sense to me, and is part of why I don't want it. I'm more than happy to come to the site whenever the comic updates. I just am finding it a lot easier to deal with my comic-reading habit by handling it through RSS instead of bookmarks. All I want is a link to the main page when it updates, which I know for a fact is perfectly possible to do--more than 2/3 of the comics I read do exactly that.
In my admittedly limited experience, comics that refuse to do RSS mostly do so out of a misapprehension that it requires they give the comic away to people without the attendant advertising on their page, which isn't true. It CAN do that, but it doesn't have to.
It might fractionally reduce the traffic to the site, since those subscribed to the RSS would only visit when there's a new comic, and on those days that it doesn't update for whatever reason they wouldn't come at all. But if I'm at all typical, a lack of comic does not increase the chances of looking at the ads--or anything else on the page. If I see no new comic, I move on right away without even seeing anything else.
And while I don't plan to stop reading Errant Story altogether if no RSS is implemented, I suspect there are some that will, even if they aren't doing it in protest--as has already been pointed out, those that do depend on RSS to read comics are far more likely to simply lose track of those few that do not offer it, much as those comics with highly erratic update schedules have trouble maintaining readership--people simply forget about such comics when they stop checking regularly.
Plus, there are certainly some out there who are sufficiently knowledgeable to write their own RSS feed (I'm not one of them)--and at least some of them are going to write one that scrapes the comic off the page and dumps it into their reader, and they're never going to go to the site again themselves. Many or most of them likely wouldn't bother to do that--and some might even stop using their own if they already have--if an official one were offered. In fact, there are several services I'm aware of out there that do this for one, and all you have to do is pick out a selection of comics from the ones they scrape with their own RSS, and sign up for their aggregator. All the comics are then delivered to one's RSS reader directly. Most of them don't provide a link to the comic's own site at all, only back to the aggregator's page. I don't really want to use a service like that, and so haven't, but I know they're out there, and I'm sure others are less scrupulous than myself.
In fact, it's entirely possible that having an RSS feed, if written a certain way, would actually fractionally increase overall traffic--if it is written to pull on the comic, news posts, and even the alerts that appear at the top of the page each separately, so that when any of them are updated, a fresh RSS is produced, those of us who used the RSS would visit the site more often. Some of the other comics I read have things set up something like that--Penny Arcade and PvP, for example.
Anyway, on the whole, if it is set up such that an RSS feed only links to the main page without linking to the archive, or worse yet, delivering the comic directly, then it won't negatively impact anything, and will make a significant (and growing) subset of readers happy.
So, to reiterate, I want to express my desire for an RSS feed of Errant Story. My continued readership is by no means contingent on it, but it would make me very happy, all the same.
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