I'm playing around with ideas for a little social networking type site, and it occurred to me that it's not appropriate for my site to have feed item nodes inherit their author from the feed node. After a bit more thought, I started to wonder if there is any situation where it might be appropriate to do so.

In my case, I'm planning to come up with a mechanism for users to "subscribe" to feeds created by any user, so feed item authorship isn't useful for identifying everybody who might be interested in reading a particular item, which is the only benefit I can see from putting a real human user's name in the author field. I was just going to use hook_nodeapi() to rewrite authorship on node creation (to 'Anonymous', or a 'Feed Monkey' user), but then I thought maybe the proper place for this was in feedapi_node.module.

Given that a considerable number of people already think that using RSS feeds on a public system is "stealing", I'm thinking it's perhaps wise not to inflame these people by (in effect) falsely attributing authorship of aggregated content, and provide a way for authorship of feed item nodes to be set to user #0 or a dedicated user account for this purpose, on a site-wide or per-feed basis.