My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

RE: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

oleg@tkachenko.com (Oleg Tkachenko) — Tue, 11 May 2004 17:59:00 GMT

RSS reader authors should think a bit about abusing web servers just for fun.
Read http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=847d181c-7b28-4863-9317-52f2940fd162

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Shannon J Hager — Tue, 11 May 2004 18:16:00 GMT

It could be as simple as you hitting refresh too many times (and hitting the site twice in 30 minutes), but keep in mind that this banishment occassionally happens when it shouldn't: http://hdconsultants.us/archive/2003/11/30/276.aspx

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Frans Bouma — Tue, 11 May 2004 18:54:00 GMT

I use sharpreader and I check every 15 minutes and it works fine. The reason for that is that the reader should first check if the file is updated. If it gets back a 'not updated' HTTP value (302 I think) it shouldn't fetch the file. Dumb readers just fetch the file, abusing the server by causing a lot of (unnecessary) traffic.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Alex Barnett — Tue, 11 May 2004 19:00:00 GMT

Frans,

I looked this up regarding FeedDeemon. See:
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/05/rss_readers_and.html

Thanks,

Alex.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Brian Duff — Tue, 11 May 2004 19:17:00 GMT

I had this problem a while back when accessing Slashdot via the Oracle corporate proxy.

It turned out that the hostname the proxy reported to Slashdot's servers was the hostname of the proxy, rather than anything that specifically identified me or my machine. It's not surprising that this caused apparent spam, because there are probably rather a lot of other people across the world sharing the same proxy.

Anyway, in my case, a quick email to banned@slashdot.org resolved the problem (I assume they have some kind of list of un-bannable proxy servers). I've never had a problem accessing the Slashdot RSS feed from inside Oracle since then.

Brian

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Sean — Tue, 11 May 2004 22:20:00 GMT

I had this happen to me too the first time I was setting up newsgator..

This policy is very odd since you can go over to their website and hit refresh on it, thus re-downloading the full page, complete with graphics and whatnot, a gazillion times without retribution... but asking for a few bits of XML (which only contains summaries and no graphics) gets you banned..

/shrug

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

kevin — Tue, 11 May 2004 23:26:00 GMT

This story is a little ironic in a subculture where "slashdotted" is now an acceptable verb.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Justin Lovell — Tue, 11 May 2004 23:50:00 GMT

Frans: HTTP 302 indicates "moved resource" (response.redirect uses this). I think that the error code is HTTP 304... but not a major detail.

Alex: You probably find that you are going through a transparent proxy along the lines. That is the best bet.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Jonathan Hardwick — Wed, 12 May 2004 04:52:00 GMT

Yup, this is related to our firewall proxy at Microsoft. Too many people reading Slashdot RSS feeds via one proxy => Slashdot bans that proxy.

I use the subaverage copy of the feed instead: http://subaverage.com/random/slashdot.rss

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Jonathan Idontknow — Wed, 12 May 2004 14:31:00 GMT

>Is this the beginning of the end? How many
>other sites will start imposing these sorts
>of policies?

Umm, dude, what do you smoke?

It's the RSS Reader writers that either need to be kicked. Every single crappy writer who knows XML writes up their on RSS readers. EACH of these check for new updates EVERY hour on EVERY site. Some more often than that. Few sites have multiple feeds.

Can you imagine what a pain in the neck that is? Can you imagine the bandwidth used?

The end is not the excellent solution Slashdot has in place (I hope this solution happens on every site). The end is the amount of RSS readers being written. I personally know two who've written RSS readers, including Bradbury, and I'll kick em. Soon. ;-)

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Nick Bradbury — Thu, 13 May 2004 01:05:00 GMT

This isn't FeeDemon's fault. As Alex points out, FeedDemon is one of the smart RSS readers - see http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/05/rss_readers_and.html

Jonathan Hardwick is correct in that the problem is due to the banning relying on the visitor's IP address. This is obviously a problem if you're accessing the net through a proxy firewall since multiple users appear to have the same IP.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Nick Bradbury — Thu, 13 May 2004 01:22:00 GMT

PS: I have to add that the subject line is misleading - your RSS reader wasn't banned by Slashdot, your IP was.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Morgan R. Pugh — Thu, 13 May 2004 03:07:00 GMT

I have this problem SO much. My ISP (NTL Cable Modem, UK) uses transparent proxy servers. Basically this means that every HTTP (port 80 and 8080) connection is automatically routed via a proxy server, this is great for ISPs (and for most users actually) as it makes things faster and saves bandwidth out of the ISPs network. However the use of transparent proxy servers means that everyone is using the same IP address for HTTP connections. Now the proxy servers are for each region however I still get problems. Infact the reason I am replying from here is because I have been on holiday for a week so I have not used my computer at all but when i just checked Slashdot my IP address was banned! I can't remember the last time I was able to access Slashdot RSS actually :(

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Update — Sat, 15 May 2004 20:02:00 GMT

Update

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

James Geurts — Sat, 15 May 2004 20:23:00 GMT

So to add a thought in the mix... I'm guessing that they care more about abuse of rdf/rss more than page refreshes because it doesn't download pictures. While that might sound ridiculous, think about the majority of their pictures. They're ads... rss gets around their main banner ad among others... I'm still amazed that people actually click on those things, but apparently enough people do, otherwise they wouldn't be in place.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Frans Bouma — Sat, 15 May 2004 22:39:00 GMT

No, it's bandwidth, not banner adds.

Also, /. regenerates its complete contents on a scheduled basis, i.e. once per 5 seconds or so. This means that you can have a manageable site which can deal with a lot of bandwidth: you feed visitors the current static site and you build a new one in the background. When done, swap. The slower the site, teh longer the time it should get to rebuild the site. You never have a slow website and it is semi dynamic as well.

Websites should also threat their RSS feeds that way. /. does this, among a lot of others, however weblogs.asp.net doesn't. (.Text doesn't). This means that each time a person requests an rss feed from weblogs.asp.net it's build dynamically.

re: My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) banned from Slashdot...the beginning of personalised RSS?

Ilya N. — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 22:21:06 GMT

You can very easily create an RSS feed using a scripting language like PHP or CGI (like example.com/rss/feed.php?feed=my.rss) which would be able to dynamically generate stuff.

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