A while back I had a little rant about copyright and why it bothered me that the LiveJournal website was copying my blog entries entirely for the tampa_gypsy feed acount. It pissed me off to no end that the folks at LJ would not remove the feed account as I requested, and instead pointed me to their FAQ on how to disable their feed grabber via .htaccess file on my site.
Needless to say, I did that, and their feed puller was getting 403 access denied errors when it hit my site.
66.150.15.150 – – [18/Nov/2005:22:14:14 -0800] “GET /~blog/wp-rss2.php HTTP/1.1” 403 335 “-” “LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://www.livejournal.com/users/tampagypsy_feed/; 16 readers)”
On the 19th of November the folks at LiveJournal/SixApart pulled a big ‘fuck you’ on everyone who had followed the instructions in their FAQ. They changed the IP address used by their feed puller, bypassing the DENY command that had previously blocked their crawler.
204.9.177.18 – – [19/Nov/2005:19:42:34 -0800] “GET /~blog/wp-rss2.php HTTP/1.1” 302 342 “-” “LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://www.livejournal.com/users/tampagypsy_feed/; 16 readers)”
Without notice, my blog entries were showing up in the tampagypsy_feed account against my expressly written wishes.
I am sure that some of the geeks reading this might want to make the argument that they probably changed their IP address as part of their server move into 365 Main, and couldn’t help that they had to change IP addresses. I can understand having to change IP addresses. I’ve had to do it lots of times. But, if they had anyone who even closely resembled a responsible systems manager they would have considered how to avoid pulling feeds from people who had actively made changes to their system indicating a desire to be excluded. I would have checked the logs (they are smart enough to log, one would hope) and see what feed accounts regularly resulted in 403 errors, since 403 errors would be the result of following the LJ exclusion instructions. I would then delete all the feeds that appeared to want to be excluded. I would change the IP addresses, and/or move the servers. Then I would update the FAQ to have the new IP address.
The monkeys at LJ did update the FAQ, but they did nothing to safeguard the desires of people who had previously excluded their old feed crawler IP address. What the hell do they expect, that I will read their FAQs on a regular basis just to make sure they are honoring my desire to not be scanned? That is complete bullshit.
Once again, the monkeys at LiveJournal/SixApart have shown a great disregard for the desires of bloggers on the internet. Why am I not suprised?
-Chris
ps. I’m going to wait until after LJ scans my feed, and loads this into their DB, to block them again. It’s only fitting…