Site news: Reducing number of entries in the RSS feeds
by Volker Weber
I spotted a new abusive pattern. Today coming in from 81.75.64.156 with MSIE 6.0 on Windows 98 with .NET CLR 1.1.4322. The client reads both feeds and then requests all linked pages. RSS traffic is already very high without this pattern. But instead of getting two hits, I am getting an additional 75.
I want my site to be read by humans and not robots. I'd rather spend the traffic on somebody who reads stuff then on somebody who collects it. As a first measure I am cutting back on the number of entries in the feeds. The number of articles will be reduced to 10 from 25 and the number of comments from 50 to 25.
I am also contemplating redirecting all MSIE traffic to Mozilla. ;-)
