[Users] Conditional requests for RSSyl

[Ivan Krylov]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2025 06:52:12 -0000
Paul <paul at claws-mail.org> wrote:

> What/who are these feed operators that you say banned users of RSSyl
> by User-Agent? 

The HackerFactor blog, <https://hackerfactor.com/blog/> and
<https://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2>.

curl -o foo.rss -v --user-agent 'libfeed 1.0' \
 https://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2

is blocked:

< HTTP/2 403

but

curl -o foo.rss -v --user-agent 'some-other-feed-reader/1.1' \
 https://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2

gets through:

< HTTP/2 200

The author explained that too many "libfeed 0.1" clients requested the
feed too frequently in the past, enough to earn a permanent ban. Now
that I double-checked the feed, I'm not seeing the RSS feed return
ETag: or Last-Modified: headers, so conditional requests wouldn't have
helped here anyway, and neither will the User-Agent change. With a
<ttl> value of only 30, it's not obvious how a client is expected to
choose the right refresh period.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan