An email from Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes pointed out something which I really hadn’t noticed – the “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us links being spliced in using “FeedBurner”:http://www.feedburner.com seem to be getting a huge number of hits – not just compared to the normal dross I put out, but compared to everyone else too. So far I’ve been unable to see how this could be happening – Javablogs only tracks reads made via JavaBlogs itself, which implies someone/something is hammering these specific entries via Javablogs itself. I think Mike is going to look into this a little more, but if we can’t find a fix I’ll pull my del.icio.us links from the Javablogs feed.
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magpiebrain 
7 Responses to “Strange happenings at JavaBlogs?”
Might Feedburner be looking at URLs that refer to the posts it builds from del.icio.us, or something?
I thought of that, but FeedBurner doesn’t access Javablogs at any point – FeedBurner looks at my public del.icio.us posts and splices them in – Javablogs then accesses FeedBurner, not the other way around. It’s all very strange – yesterday my del.icio.us summary posting got over 700 reads, the next nearest post only around 200!
Are you actually seeing those hits on your server, or is this weirdness just in Javablogs’ counts? I’ve run into weirdness with their counts before, at least between posts within my blogs. Maybe you’re getting credited with other peoples’ hits, for example.
It’s certainly not hits on my server – the del.icio.us feeds that get spliced in all point either to del.icio.us itself, or to the actual sites I bookmark. Its Javablogs which is getting the large hits. Javablogs inflating just my blog count I could understand, but in fact it is only inflating the count of part of my RSS feed – my normal posts aren’t seeing read counts any higher than normal.
Hi there. Dick Costolo from FeedBurner here. In the past week, there has been a process coming from a couple ip addresses that have been hitting FeedBurner spliced del.icio.us links only (and hitting them exactly once a minute). Not all spliced feeds but some. Bizarre but true. The process only seems to make http requests of some of the del.icio.us links that are specifically spliced into FB feeds. We tracked the originating ip addresses down to a specific organization, notified them, and nothing changed, so we banned the specific ip addresses until the requests stop. We’ll take a look at your feed tomorrow morning and make sure that your feed has been “fixed” by our ip ban solution. If not, we’ll look into it and sort it out and get back to you. The issue is particularly annoying since it just serves to hammer the del.icio.us servers constantly with automated requests.
It’s good to see you spotted something Dick. For the hits to be applying to Javablogs read counter implies that at least some of the pounding of del.icio.us posts is happening via Javablogs itself – so I’m not sure your IP ban will affect this (unless it was something in Javablogs doing the pounding), but I’ll keep an eye on it. Anyway, I’ll let the Javablogs guys know what you’ve seen. Thanks for the info…
gggg