DISQUS

Hi folks. This is a very thoughtful post, as usual, so I wanted to make sure we provided the courtesy of commenting here. The challenge here is that IP/user-agent controls are just the start of an arms race that will eventually render the existing plugins useless. IP spoofing and user-agent masking are as old as the hills and these scraping tools will simply be enhanced in a matter of hours to make the User agent look like a desktop newsreader and the ip's will bounce around. At that point, it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to detect the offenders and the tools that are currently in effect at FeedBurner will once again be the tools at everybody's disposal. Note that I'm *not* saying that this makes it "not worth the time" to add these protections, I don't want to imply that at all, they're obviously helpful. I'm only saying that the added protection will be shortlived once a critical mass of people are using them. So, the challenge for us at FeedBurner is a) how do you add protections that don't become obsolete in days, and b) how do you leverage the power of the aggregate community to identify things that would be otherwise monumentally challenging for the individual to identify. Note also that we may not always publicly announce things we do here, since it obviously highlights to the scrapers that it's time to update their crawlers.

This is great feedback, Aaron. We have a big Foundry rev planned to start in a couple weeks, and I think that some of the things you look for in the API will/should also be available in Foundry. Things like "add all 200 of these properties to the FAN", etc....you should ultimately be able to choose whether you want to use the API or the Foundry UI for some of those "bulk feed management" tasks.

Hey Matt, that's a FeedBurner brokered ad. Agree completely about uber-niche media consumption....it's definitely upon us.

Hi there Paul. FeedBurner actually does support requirement number 1 quite extensively. In the case of wordpress, it's easily done with Steve Smith's ordered list plugin, and subscribers need not ever see a FeedBurner url. This also then supports his requirement to be able to move on AND off the service seamlessly, with no effort on his part to "move subscribers"...they always subscribe to the original url and behind the curtain it either redirects through FeedBurner or stops when you choose to stop using FeedBurner. We do publicize these capabilities but clearly need to publicize them MORE :)

Hi there, this is Dick Costolo from FeedBurner. This is a great post and very thoughtful. I have commented on this issue on a couple blogs, but we specifically designed buzzBoost so that it would be USELESS to spammers and adsense trickster and other nefarious users of such a tool. Because it is solely javascript based, the content doesn't get indexed by any search bot, there are no contextual ads that can be placed around it, AND our terms of service, unlike a few other tools, explicitly prevents anybody but the owner of the copyrights to the content from using the service. We absolutely and completely understand the issue you are describing and it's why we only provided a script based version of the tool. If there are nefarious potential uses of BuzzBoost (i like the word "nefarious") that you can think of that we haven't covered, please do shoot us a personal note at feedback at feedburner doht com and we will be delighted to engage in a conversation on the topic. We think this is going to be a huge area of interest in the coming months, and it's incumbent on services like us that are specifically publisher focused to make sure we help provide tools that can be used for good, so that rationalizations for promoting questionable tools :) are less compelling.