Slashdot is banning my RSS aggregator and displays the ban through RSS:
My aggregator (NetNewsWire) is tuned to update feeds every hour (they say the limit is 30mn), only when the laptop is on off course, which leads to probably a dozen requests to their server a day. And NNW is nice enough to ask if the content has been modified since its last passage, before downloading the whole thing (a whopping 5KB of data, ranked close to a DoS attack for /. servers).
Given the past bans that I've seen even with a regular browser, I guess that they still have not got that some ISPs are using proxys to cache content, making all their customers appear behind the same IP address. Considering the tone and duration (much more than 72 hours) of their RSS ban though, it sounds to me that they do not like aggregators too much, and that they will be deft to any complaint.
Not that big of an issue, there are plenty of interesting and more user-friendly news sources out there.
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Yeah, but not as good as Slashdot.
You mean to say that Slashdot became a victim of the Slashdot Effect?
Ah Ah, excellent remark Sunny!
I expect the reason they don't encourage aggregators (who pose a much smaller bandwidth burden) is that RSS feeds don't include their stupid banner adds for Nerd T-Shirts and Open Source Rulez coffee mugs.
And anyway, as you point out, once you have a good aggregator, you can easily cover a lot of more interesting blogs anyway.
You have a point about the ads Mike, but not that big of a point. Slashdot's news titles are usually not very informative, and they don't even include summary tags in their RSS feed.
At most slashdot is losing one page load maybe on average of 1.5 times a day. You still view the ads when you follow the RSS links.