Google Portal Banned From Slashdot

Thursday, May. 26 2005 | Author: jeremy

I have been using the Google “Portal” for a few days and I think I like it. I can see my Gmail account, see what the weather is like outside my window-less office,and even check out some of the latest news from Wired and Slashdo…wait a minute. What is this?

Apparently, Google has been hitting the Slashdot RSS feed more than they should.

Our policy is to allow one request every 30 minutes. We’ll allow a few more before you will get banned, and we are more flexible still with proxy servers. However, in many cases, we have no choice but to ban abuse.

Theoretically, Google should be making local copies of all these RSS feeds that do not update more than once every 30 minutes (or whatever the usage policy of that feed states).

Category: Uncategorized

7 Responses for "Google Portal Banned From Slashdot"

Robert

May 26th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
1

Slashdot has similarly auto-banned Bloglines (more than once) in the past. I’m sure it’ll work out in the end, but it makes me wonder if the auto-bannination at Slashdot is a little flaky.
Doug Clifton

May 26th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
2

I happen to like bloglines, they’re easy to set-up, easy for the user, and they honor 304s. When your feed updates, send an Etag and a Last-modified, the next time the bot comes around check the HTTP headers and if they still have a cached copy (and your feed hasn’t changed), then send back a 304. Headers and all, you’re talking maybe 500 bytes of data, as opposed to, well…that depends on your feed. ~d
norgus

May 26th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
3

I thought this might be the case, as my firefox slashdot RSS feed is banned more often than not. (in fact I get it back more often than not when I have a change of IP, than the ban running out)

would have thought google avoided getting banned though.

Maybe its unavilable for another reason? My gmail messages have been ‘temporarily unavailable’ more than once before on the google personla homepage. Don’t think google would ban itself for checking its own service more often than they allow. :P
Jeremy Flint

May 26th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
4

I know of several sites that allow people to use their RSS feeds that have terms of use limiting the number of times that the feed can be hit.

For instance, Weather.com says you can only hit their current weather feed every thirty minutes, and their forecast feeds every 90 minutes. I used these for a site I built, and ended up writing an ASP script that copied the file to a local version, and checked the timestamp whenever it was called.
norgus

May 26th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
5

well if you check your google custom home page now it seems to be working again.
Justin Koh

May 27th, 2005 at 3:44 am
6

I’ve been banned from Slashdot before because every time I launch Firefox my Live Bookmark reloads. /.’s auto ban is a bit on the strict side.
AkaXakA

May 27th, 2005 at 8:51 am
7

Actually, Slashdot auto-banned themselves that day, so there’s nothing to be worried about.