Ban43 (Ban For Free)

Feed43 now features Ban43 (Ban For Free) -- an automatic abuse detection and banning system. This system polls server logs periodically to analyse for abusive user agents/crawlers. The rule is simple:

• Request any of Feed43 feeds for 24 times in a 6-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 15 minutes), and your IP will be banned temporarily (for 6 hours).
• Request any of Feed43 feeds for 180 times in a 6-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 2 minutes), and your IP will be added to permanent ban list.

Banned IPs are denied access to all Feed43 feeds and feed creation/editing facilities. You can see the list of currently banned IPs here.

You are kindly requested to obey 6-hour poll interval for any of Feed43 feeds.

Good news

First, we've moved to the new server.

Second, we've recovered from recent problems caused by kind of DOS attack when one of our feeds has been requested every single second by some weird spider. This IP is banned forever, and the owner of this IP should have been already warned by it's hoster.

After some investigation, I have realized that there are some user agents/spiders that do not obey "ttl" parameter of the feeds completely and pull data every 5 minutes or so. This is not a 1-second interval, but nevertheless. To avoid our service lockouts in the future, and to give more air to fellow users that behave nice, I'm planning to create some slashdot-alike automated service to temporarily ban IPs that pollute our service with requests.

Third, I've created a 'CPU protection' feature that tests search patterns against their CPU usage, and recovers from difficult situations gracefully, asking user to refactor search pattern to make it faster (I've added some help on that into context help).

I would like to thank everyone for patience during this incident and want to specially mention Eliot and Blake who donated some money for a faster server. Thank you guys!

We're moving to faster server

In a few hours as new DNS settings will propagate, Feed43 will switch to new, more powerful server. Until that, old server will still be running, but won't serve feeds and won't let you create new feeds. Thank you for understanding.

Server load problem

In last two days Feed43 server is experiencing high load (number of feeds served is 700+ already). This caused our hosting company to temporarily disable public access to Feed43 engine, since physical server is shared among many other clients. We're working on this, and hope to re-enable it soon, but Feed43 server needs to be moved to a new more powerful (and more expensive) hosting plan. We ask you for patience.

If you want to help Feed43 and make a small donation, just write us.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug with improper ETag calculation under specific circumstances.
• Loading web pages which contained \0 ("zero") symbols would result in 'Invalid XML...' error -- fixed.
  

Added service usage stats

Feed43 index page now includes a 7-day usage graph (number of active feeds for a given day). It will update once a day.

New feature: Private feeds

Now you can create private feeds, i.e. protect your feeds with user name and password using HTTP 'Basic' authentication, which is supported by most news readers (desktop and web-based).

This feature is named 'Make this feed private' feature and can be found under Optional features.

You can use 'Send me summary e-mail' option to receive feed settings including your currently defined user name and password.

I must additionally say that if you make your feed private, typed in credentials will be sent each time over the network by HTTP protocol in plain text (pretty insecure). We plan to add HTTPS protocol support in the futute to make your feeds truly private and secure.


Other recent improvements include:

• 'Delivered by Feed43 service' tagline now appears less frequently depending on the content length of news items.
  
• Feed title and item title are automatically truncated to max. 150 symbols (some news readers don't like too long headings).

Added stylesheet for feeds

Now if you open any feed in your browser, it will be rendered with a nice stylesheet, so you can read the feed instantly.

Tested in MSIE 6, MSIE 7 and Firefox. Opera is currently not supported. Note that Internet Explorer 7 overrides custom stylesheets and shows feed contents in it's own style.

Added support for ETag

Added support for ETag/If-None-Match headers in both directions. Now Feed43 is absoultely well-behaved.