Yahoo groups rss blocking since 01/13/2004

["dror" <dror@zapatec.com>]

Hi Folks,

There's plenty of irony in here. 

We at fastbuzz.com provide an online aggregator and search engine. We
have hundreds of users and so poll many thousands of channels.

Yahoo started blocking us yesterday from polling Yahoo group rss
feeds. It looks like they have some threshold, (around 400?) of the
number of groups that they will let you poll in a day. 

I couldn't find anywhere either on
http://news.yahoo.com/rss/
or on
http://groups.yahoo.com/
about what the policy is with regard to their rss feeds and polling.

This is a similar problem that we've seen with slashdot about a month
ago. Slashdot at least had a stated policy on what their requirement
was. They didn't want you to poll more than every hour. The cluless
part of their policy was that they this requirement was for *all*
channels. So if you subscribed to all 12 channels you had to do it
over a period of 12 hours.

I can understand that the publishers want to make sure that their
resources don't get abused. But we're actually making their lives
easier. Instead of having a lot of desktop applications go and fetch
the same feeds again and again, we do it in one centralized place, and
then the readers come to our site. 

So if anyone has any clarifcations on Yahoo's policies on this, or can
point me to a URL about this, or even better get us unblocked, I'd be
greatful.

As for the irony:
This *is* a yahoo group, which means that I won't be able to see the
responses in my aggregator.

Regards,

Dror

--
Dror Matalon
Zapatec Inc
1700 MLK Way
Berkeley, CA 94709
http://www.fastbuzz.com
http://www.zapatec.com