Tag: feedburner

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In the past days both Heinz and Ric alerted me that my RSS feeds wasn’t reachable for them. My log files quickly showed what was happening, Netnewswire, FeedBin and TinyTinyRSS were blocked by my hoster as ‘bad bots’ whenever they tried to reach my RSS feed:

[Thu Mar 26 03:43:49.372015 2020] [:error] [pid 501480] [client 95.143.172.147:48116] [client 95.143.172.147] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Matched phrase "tt-rss.org" at REQUEST_HEADERS:User-Agent. [file "/etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/modsecurity_localrules.conf"] [line "2"] [id "350001"] [msg "Bad Bot Rule: Black Bot detected. "] [hostname "www.zylstra.org"] [uri "/blog/feed/"] [unique_id "XnwW5ZujCwgIM-xP-57OfAAAAAE"], referer: http://www.zylstra.org/blog/feed/
[Thu Mar 26 04:06:25.506843 2020] [:error] [pid 452702] [client 157.230.163.157:51478] [client 157.230.163.157] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Matched phrase "Feedbin" at REQUEST_HEADERS:User-Agent. [file "/etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/modsecurity_localrules.conf"] [line "2"] [id "350001"] [msg "Bad Bot Rule: Black Bot detected. "] [hostname "www.zylstra.org"] [uri "/blog/feed/"] [unique_id "XnwcMZhpXdX8450kb5sLbgAAABI"]
[Thu Mar 26 05:45:54.289670 2020] [:error] [pid 681301] [client 69.172.186.78:39628] [client 69.172.186.78] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Matched phrase "NetNewsWire" at REQUEST_HEADERS:user-agent. [file "/etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/modsecurity_localrules.conf"] [line "2"] [id "350001"] [msg "Bad Bot Rule: Black Bot detected. "] [hostname "www.zylstra.org"] [uri "/blog/comments/feed/"] [unique_id "XnwzggS4@-ngUalhqeVluAAAAA4"]

I submitted a ticket with my hoster Thursday but they have been unusually unresponsive this time. So for the time being I created a Feedburner RSS feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/InterdependentThoughts, so at least those that have this issue can resolve it. However Feedburner has been part of Google since 2007, which means the service hasn’t evolved apart from that it tracks your reading habits. So I’m on the lookout for a replacement service that does the same as Feedburner, except that it isn’t Feedburner, so sans the tracking.

[UPDATE 2020-03-30: the blocked feedreaders are now unblocked again. I’ll keep the Feedburner feed alive for now. Will likely rename it to something under my own domain [no longer possible], and my try to replace it with something like granary.io]