Using a self-hosted reader with Open RSS feeds

Having a full-blown RSS reader on your own servers gives you an ultimate level of ownership and control. But, as you may already know, with that comes a great deal of responsibility. Here are some guidelines to ensure a good experience and avoid any unexpected behavior when using Open RSS feeds with your self-hosted app.

Your app likely comes with the ability to customize the rate at which it will request new content for RSS feeds. Please avoid setting this to a value that will cause the app to make requests to Open RSS feeds more frequently than the rate we indicate in our responses.

Each response to an Open RSS feed includes a Cache-Control header with a max-age that tells you when there is likely new content to be retrieved from a feed. Here's an example.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/xml
Content-Length: 124
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2022 12:23:45 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=300

You'll notice that the Cache-Control header in the response has a max-age, which represents the amount of time (in seconds) before there's likely new content. This means that the app should allow at least 5 minutes (300s / 60s) to elapse before making another request to this same feed.

If you're unsure of whether the app you're using is adjusting its requests according to our responses, we recommended reaching out to the app's developer to confirm before using it with Open RSS feeds.

We rely on user agents to diagnose and resolve issues that may be specifically affecting particular RSS readers and to decrease the likelihood of tripping our security mechanisms. So when your app is making requests to Open RSS feeds, it should use a consistent user agent that uniquely identifies itself.

The user agent should include the name of the app, its version, and a URL that contains a way for us to contact the app's developer. Here's an example of a good user agent.

Spoofing or using user agents that are not representative of the application is not only unsupported, but it's also a violation of our Terms of Use and can lead to the app being banned.

When using a self-hosted app, you're using your own servers or network. So details like your network location (IP address) will be sent along when making requests to Open RSS feeds. We value your privacy, so when using a self-hosted RSS application, it's important to be familiar with our Privacy Policy to understand more about what information we collect and how it's used.

Make sure your using the self-hosted reader with an IP address that isn't blacklisted (usually VPN ones) because remote assets like images/videos/images/etc may be blocked from loading. If this is the case, they won't show up in the RSS reader.

Last Updated: 2 months ago