Sunday, August 03, 2008
More liberal abuse detection policy, and some tips
You all know we have a special abuse prevention script that blocks IPs that request feeds way too often, which allows us to reduce load on our server. However some of our customers periodically reported that they were blocked accidentally because of testing the resuting feed in browser. To make less false positives when detecting abuse, we decided to change our policy.
Now we count hits in 24-hour frame (previously we used 6-hour frame):
¶ 12:06 - If you request any of Feed43 feeds for at least 96 times in a 24-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 15 minutes), you will see your IP in 'Banned temporarily' list.
- If you request any of Feed43 feeds for at least 720 times in a 24-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 2 minutes), you will be banned permanently.
This means that when testing your feed in browser, you can reload it up to 95 times (4 times more than previously).
As a side note -- if you are testing some script on your web site which is going to pull one of our feeds, we recommend to save the feed XML file locally and test your script with that local static XML file, and only then change the pointer to the real feed on Feed43 server; not doing so is a common oversight which might easily lead to your IP being blocked.
