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RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

Nick Bradbury — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:32:41 GMT

Hi folks,

I have yet to hear back again from IceRocket about this. I don't know what to make of their first response, nor their lack of follow-up. All I can suggest at this point is that you try using another RSS search engine.

Best,

RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

Su — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:21:57 GMT

[quote][b]Nick Bradbury (7/3/2008)[/b][hr]I just received this reply from IceRocket:

"Nick, we are actually not allowing automated news searches anymore. Blog searches are fine but we just got way too many automated news requests so we had to shut it off"

I've asked them to clarify their response, though, since it doesn't make sense that a 403 is returned when FeedDemon is the user agent, but the feed works fine in IE7 and Firefox. I'll reply again here once they've responded again.[/quote]

Great, so they "turned it off" but left the button around to frustrate us. If they don't want people subscribing to news searches, then they probably shouldn't offer them, either.

One more detail: I don't know exactly what the example you provided them was, but his statement's not entirely accurate. I had never even bothered with a news search. He's correct that blog searches are being allowed(though I swear I tried it the other day), but both [b]web [/b]and [b]MySpace[/b] queries are also being blocked in addition to news.

(Thanks for tracking this, by the way.)

RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

critter42 — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:57:02 GMT

It makes doubly no sense, because even though they're blocking FeedDemon, they're not blocking NewsGator or Feedburner - and i can probably think of several more ways to get that search feed into FD (Yahoo! Pipes come to mind, for instance). I'm just speechless (ok, at least as speechless as I can get :) )

(yeah, yeah, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is one of those "do they even know what their business does" kind of answers that make my head go all asplody :) )

RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

Nick Bradbury — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:08:52 GMT

I just received this reply from IceRocket:

"Nick, we are actually not allowing automated news searches anymore. Blog searches are fine but we just got way too many automated news requests so we had to shut it off"

RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

Nick Bradbury — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:22:01 GMT

I can confirm this, and it looks like IceRocket is specifically prohibiting FeedDemon. I used an "HTTP sniffer" to trace the request, and I noticed that it always fails when the user-agent is FeedDemon (the exact same request works just fine with other user-agents).

I just used IceRocket's contact form to ask them why this is happening.

Best,

RE: Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

critter42 — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:18:36 GMT

Yeah, I can confirm - that's strange;

However, I was able to subscribe to the feed via NewsGator and it synched on down to FeedDemon fine.
Not sure why. Also, I was able to sign up for their RSS Builder service, created a test feed and FD was successfully able to subscribe to it.

Finally, I took the search feed from the above post, plugged it into Feedburner and created a Feedburner feed and was able to successfully subscribe to that - this can be a workaround if you don't want to sync the feed with Newsgator.

Icerocket forbids Feeddemon subscriptions?

Su — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:16:01 GMT

So, let's say you go to Icerocket and do a [url=http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?tab=web&q=wordpress]web search for WordPress[/url]. You get a bunch of results.

If you click the auto-discovery button to subscribe and leave the "check for problems" checkbox on, FD returns a generic "was unable to download..." error.

Now, if you click the "[url=http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=web&q=wordpress&rss=1]Results RSS[/url]" link in the sidebar, you get the source for a [url=http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.icerocket.com%2Fsearch%3Ftab%3Dweb%26q%3Dwordpress%26rss%3D1]perfectly valid feed[/url]. The URL for that sidebar link is identical to the autodiscovery link.

Now, subscribe again via autodiscovery, but deactivate the "check for problems" box. The feed will at least be added, but you'll be informed FD is being fed a 403 error.

Can anyone else confirm this? I've tried it with several terms.