What is the Feedsubs Fetcher?
Feedsubs is an Open-Source RSS feed reader. Users of the service add RSS feeds they want to follow and the Fetcher retrieves their content periodically.
What does the Fetcher retrieve exactly?
- Feeds added by users
- Images linked in the feed content
How often does the Fetcher hit my site?
On average the Fetcher retrieves each feed twice per hour. If your website offers many different feeds you may see more hits. Each image linked in the feed will be retrieved once when the fetcher first encounters it.
Why does Feedsubs retrieve images?
Some images attached in feeds can be retrieved and cached by Feedsubs in order to:
- Avoid hot linking images, preventing third-party websites from paying for the bandwidth used by Feedsubs users.
- Prevent security issues related to loading third-party content, like HTTPS mixed content warnings.
How to prevent Feedsubs from fetching my content?
Feedsubs only fetches files that are publicly available on the Internet. If you wish to prevent automated tools from retrieving them you may:
- Not publish the feeds in the first place. Most CMS have an option to disable the generation of RSS and Atom feeds.
- Block the Feedsubs Fetcher user-agent.
Note that Feedsubs does not read robots.txt files because it does not crawl websites but merely fetches the content requested by human users.
What is the Fetcher user-agent?
When retrieving feeds, the Fetcher identifies itself with the following string. The additional information allows websites to know how many users are subscribed.
{{ "" | example_user_agent }}
The Fetcher is misbehaving, where can I signal the issue?
You can send an email to info@feedsubs.com.