Webmaster PSA: RSSingBot

I encourage people to follow this site and The New Leaf Journal via feed. But while I welcome feed readers, I do not welcome bots and scrapers that fetch my feeds for the purpose of effectively re-publishing my articles without permission, especially for profit. I wrote about blocking one such manevolent crawler, RSS Amplifier’s rssamplifier.com reader, in a NLJ essay. I just added another one to my block list. RSSing sounds like a charming feed reader, but I found that it was scraping my NLJ feeds and re-producing “content” from my full-text feeds on its ad-supported website. I added it to my .htaccess and robot.txt block lists, where it joins RSS Amplifier. See my Codeberg commit for the .htaccess side of things and my entire lists on Codeberg and GitHub.

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