I’ve had a number of people ask me about this blog entry, whose title suggests that FeedDemon was banned from Slashdot. If you read the entire entry you’ll find out that the subject is misleading – it’s really about how Slashdot tries to protect itself from people who make too many requests on their feed.
Given the unnecessary bandwidth consumption caused by some RSS readers, Slashdot certainly has every right to try to protect themselves from RSS abuse. The problem is that they ban based on IP address – which obviously causes problems for those behind a proxy server that shares a single IP address with dozens of other users. In all fairness, though, I’m not sure of a better solution to Slashdot’s valid concerns.
Anyway…since some who read the aforementioned article thought it might be due to a problem in FeedDemon, I just wanted to make it clear that this will happen regardless of which RSS reader you use if you’re behind an IP-sharing proxy. As I pointed out in an earlier post, FeedDemon employs a number of techniques to keep bandwidth consumption to a minimum – which not only keeps it ‘Net-friendly, but also makes it extremely fast since it doesn’t waste time performing unnecessary updates.
RSS IP Blocking
Nick Bradbury brought up the problem of RSS readers that are checking in too often and using up valuable bandwidth. So here is my clever idea that I don’t know how to implement just yet. RSS feeds are almost all dynamically generated (who would code th…
Corporate RSS reader risk
Corporate RSS reader risk: Nick Bradbury points out a potential snag if you use a clientside RSS reader while sharing an exposed IP address with others… if someone else on your proxy server misconfigures their reader to make too-frequent calls…
Syndication Bandwidth Consumption
This morning Scoble had an interesting post on the bandwidth problems RSS is causing Microsoft. I don’t think this is a problem with the general syndication model, the problem here is due to the nature of the feed in question.