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Comment by garfij | Hacker News Reader

I believe if you read carefully, it's not blocked, it's rate limited to once daily, with very clear remediation steps included in the response.

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If you understand what rate limiting is, you block them for a period of time. Let's stop being pedantic here.

72 requests per day is nothing and acting like it's mayhem is a bit silly. And for a lot of people would result in them getting possible news slower. Sure OP won't publish that often but their rate limiting is an edge case and should be treated as such. If they're blocked until the next day and nothing gets updated then the only person harmed is OP for being overly bothered by their HTTP logs.

Sure it's their server and they can do whatever they want. But all this does is hurts the people trying to reach their blog.

72 requests per day _per user with a naive feed reader_. This is a small personal blog with no ads that OP is self-hosting on her own hardware, so blocking all this junk traffic is probably saving her money. Plus she's calling attention to how feed readers can be improved!

My reason for smacking stuff down is that I don't want to see it in my logs. That simple.

Even if they had 1000 feed readers which would be a massive amount for a blog, if you can't scale that cheaply, that's on you.

As I pointed out, her blog and rate limiting are an extreme edge case, it would be silly for anyone to put effort into changing their feed reader for a single small blog. It's bad product management.

Of course she can. It's static. She doesn't want and I understand. She's signaling their clients an standard call to say "I think you already have read this, at lest ask me first when this changed the last time".

If you choose to run a poorly implemented rss feed and not scale it cheaply you lose any sympathy from me.

So long as you know what If-Modified-Since is, and use it, you can have all or none of the sympathy you want.

> 72 requests per day is nothing and acting like it's mayhem is a bit silly.

72 requests per day per IP over how many IPs? When you start multiplying numbers together they can get big.

I invite you to run your own popular blog on your own hardware and pay for the costs. It sounds like you don't know what the true costs are.

I do run a popular blog, and a $5 a month Digital Ocean droplet handles millions of requests per month without breaking a sweat.

If every user is collecting 36mb a day like in the story here, your droplet wouldn’t even be capable of serving 500 users a month without hitting your bandwidth limit. With their current rates, your one million requests would cost you around 10 million USD.

30 * 500 * 36mb = 560gb and I have 1tb a month on my apparently $6 droplet

Correction - from my billing page it's $4.50 a month, from the resize page it is $6 so I'm guessing I am grandfathered in to some older pricing

That's ridiculously big quantity of data to serve a seldomly updated blog just because the client doesn't want (or know how, or think about) to implement an easy and old http method.

Imagine the petabytes of data transferred through the internet saved if a couple RSS clients added that method.

If OP enabled gzip then this 36mb would be 13mb.

If OP reduced 30 months of posts in rss to 12 months then this 13mb would be 5mb a day.

Using Cloudflare free plan and this static content is cached without any problem.

Yeah, but also... if RSS readers behaved correctly, it would be 512 kb. (170 kb with gzip, if she didn't enable it like you imply – I'm too lazy to check, but I assumed it was on.)

I think making clients behave correctly is much more sustainable solution, although we could do better than doing so at the cost of the end users.

This entire thread is a vivid illustration of why software is so shitty in general these days.

OP has never said that this is about financial aspects of things.

Yews, it's about enforcing their preference on how others should interact with OP's published site feed, on principle. Which is always an uphill battle.

It's about enforcing that people follow standards. Which is still an uphill battle, but at least it's based in something sane. Their work on this has resulted in improvements to a whole slew of popular feed readers that should make life easier for a chunk of the internet, not just OP's own site.

I serve 30tb/month for $30/mo on my own colocated hw

Sounds like you don't know how to scale for cheap.

And since I've ran integrations that connected over 500 companies. I know what a rouge client actually looks like and 72 requests per day and I wouldn't even notice.

Good on you champ.

More like a skill issue or just decision to make your life more difficult.

It is free and easy to scale this kind of text based blog.

> More like a skill issue

Hey, I think you mistook HN for Reddit.

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