RSS WILL DOOM US ALL

[waider]

Death of Internet Predicted, Film at 11. Couple of hints: 1. don't provide an RSS feed. 2. Don't advertise your RSS feed beyond people you're actually interested in having read it. 3. Provide an RSS feed with correct syndication headers, so that RSS readers know only to hit your feed once a week or whatever - sure, not everyone respects this, but it's at least worth doing.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

There was an IP that was hitting my Supreme Court RSS feed (an especially fat one because it contains a paragraph of legalese for every entry) twice a minute, 24/7. That feed updates once a day at the absolute most because that's when the script that generates it runs, and seldom that frequently in practice, usually more like once a week, because that's when the Web site it's watching updates. So I stuck the offending IP in my .htaccess with instructions to return 403 forbidden.

Several months later I got an email from the admin of that IP asking about it; I explained the reason for the block, he said he'd make his script behave, and so I removed the block.

IMHO, this is the way such things ought to work. I'm hesitant to try to make official Rules for dealing with such situations, and since the point of providing RSS feeds is to increase readership of the stuff I'm publishing, it would seem foreign to me to cry too many tears if in fact the readership does increase. If the traffic got to be more than I wanted to pay for, I'd start selling ad space.