RE: [syndication] Re: [RSS-DEV] How should a feed tell people it's gone?

["Michael Moncur" <mgm-lists@starlingtech.com>]

> The most popular user agent on NewsIsFree is gnome-vfs. Part of
> gnome obviously, not sure what it's used for. It does not report
> errors to the user and just gets the feeds over and over again.
> I blocked that user agent altogether. Have done so for several
> months. In december, I got 1.5 million hits from software with
> that agent alone. All for nothing. Crazy.

I did a bit of research on this one, and apparently it's Nautilus, a graphical
shell for gnome, that generates these requests for its RSS sidebar. It's
incredibly ill-behaved and I've been considering blocking it by user agent on
my sites as well.

I don't have it reading any defunct feeds, but it apparently is set to re-read
feeds about every five minutes by default. I have thousands of requests logged
from individual IP addresses who are reading my feeds 200-300 times per day -
and since my most popular feeds are "Quotes of the Day" and "Motivational
Quotes of the Day", updated once per 24 hours, this is ridiculous.

Here's a list of Nautilus's default RSS feeds, including my Quotes of the Day
and at least one newsisfree.com feed:
http://nautilus.eazel.com/rss/

--
michael moncur   mgm at starlingtech.com   http://www.starlingtech.com/
"Of those who say nothing, few are silent."     -- Thomas Neill