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Comment by kelsey98765431 | Hacker News Reader

if you have to 429 people for an rss feed the problem is you

I think it's an acceptable response. Not only there's no SLA, but people are free to not provide a service to misbehaving user agents. It's like rejecting connections from Tor.

If anything, a 429 is a nice heads up. It could have been worse; she could have redirected those requests to a separate URL with an... unpleasant content, like a certain domain that redirects to I-don't-know-what whenever they detect the Referer header is from HN.

As interesting as that site is, and as much as I sympathise with the author's plight, that site's behavior is so anti-me that I'm going to ignore it whenever/wherever it pops up. I'm not trolling the author, I'm not calling them names or anything, I was just interested in the technical stuff. I wish them good luck.

I think that's the whole point - that author won't begrudge you for not visiting their site. They detest HN ideologically, so losing HNer traffic won't ruin their day.

Rachel isn't serving adverts on on her blog. She's not trying to sell you on her consulting business.

So my question to you is... ...why is it so anti-you, and why should it be different?

I don't mean Rachel. Please read my parent a few times - that's what I was answering to. You might not know what my parent is referring to, but it's a different blog.

There's a particular type of person that scours their HTTP logs and makes up rules that block 90% of feed readers using the default poll interval. If I stick your RSS feed into Miniflux and I get 429'd, I just stop reading your blog. Learn2cache. I'm talking to you, Cheapskate's Guide.

This site would not 429 current Miniflux, since it makes conditional requests. She has a previous post outlining cache respecting behaviour of many common feed readers.

It could 429 it for conditional requests as well:

> Unconditional requests: at most once per 24 hour period.

> Conditional requests: at most once per 60 minute period.

(Source: calling `curl hxxps://rachelbythebay[.]com/w/atom.xml` twice)

> Learn2cache

I find this a particularly amusing comment, given that the main complaint is about feed reader's not sending conditional requests.

Learn2cache indeed, feed reader authors.

Nobody owes these people and their feed readers a 200 whenever they want one.

not when the client sends unconditional requests i.e. missing If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers.

All feed readers/clients should cache responses when sending multiple requests the same day.

If you don't stop at red lights, the problem is other people. /s

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