Comments on: Google Portal Banned From Slashdot

By: AkaXakA

AkaXakA — Fri, 27 May 2005 13:51:22 +0000

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

By: Justin Koh

Justin Koh — Fri, 27 May 2005 08:44:41 +0000

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.

By: norgus

norgus — Thu, 26 May 2005 22:00:35 +0000

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

By: Jeremy Flint

Jeremy Flint — Thu, 26 May 2005 20:29:30 +0000

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.

By: norgus

norgus — Thu, 26 May 2005 20:17:05 +0000

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

By: Doug Clifton

Doug Clifton — Thu, 26 May 2005 19:03:58 +0000

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

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 26 May 2005 18:11:03 +0000

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.