Oh Yeah? Well You're Not Allowed To Visit My Site For 72 Hours Either, Slashdot.org!
I decided to try out SharpReader tonight. I figured, why not just pull down the OPML files from blogs.gotdotnet.com, weblogs.asp.net, and a few others, and plug them on in? What could be the harm?
Having never tried this before, it turns out that there is quite a bit of potential harm.
I am now subscribed to hundreds of blogs--all of which were synchronized at once. None of them seemed to mind, except for slashdot.org, one of the most compassionate, understanding, well-behaved sites on the Web. The messages went something like:
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: You may only load headlines every 30 minutes
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: Your headline reader has been banned
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: We Have Located Your Address And Are Coming To Shut You Down
12/23/2003 4:06 AM: All Your Bases Are Belong To Us, We Are h4X0r
(Okay, I made those last two up)
Anyway, I didn't end up getting any headlines from them at all, so there must be others on my shared proxy that were banging on the RSS feed. Ordinarily I'd understand a company's efforts to protect itself and its resources, but it's not like Slashdot has ever given Microsoft a break. Rather than fix the issue with more efficient RSS serving, they just cut people off. Smooth.
Just kidding, I love those guys. Seriously, don't come to my house.
It's just too bad I'll have to limit my daily doses of Microsoft bashing to the comments on Scoble's blog for the next 72 hours.