Why is Open RSS scraping my website?

If you're a website owner and you've noticed Open RSS requesting content from your site, it's probably because one of your visitors noticed your site doesn't have an RSS feed, so they used Open RSS to make one for it.

One of your website visitors goes to our website (openrss.org) to create an RSS feed out of your website's content. Then they subscribe to that feed in their RSS reader app. After that, Open RSS periodically checks your website for new content to add to the feed.

Having our organization serve an RSS feed for your site might seem a little strange. But plenty of websites don't offer RSS feeds, even though a lot of users prefer them. That's why we strongly recommend providing your own RSS feed for your website, which would make our service unnecessary.

A lot of people prefer to read website content through an app called an RSS reader, for two main reasons. Using an RSS reader lets your website visitors:

1. Keep up with your content without having to constantly check your website for updates, and
2. Consume your website content more easily, in an app they're more familiar with

But don't worry. Just because your site visitors use an RSS reader to consume your content doesn't mean they'll never visit the site again. The content is shown to them in the reader verbatim, with everything intact, and it all still links back to your website.

RSS feeds have been around since the early days of the web, and the people who use them tend to be pretty attached. So you're probably not going to talk them out of it, just for your website.

But hey — it's your website, so you can do whatever you want, including blocking Open RSS from accessing it. If you decide to go that route, we'll respect it. We'll just let your visitors know you prefer not to offer RSS feeds for your website. But fair warning: the usual reaction is that those people will just stop visiting your site and won't be shy about telling others why.

Instead of blocking Open RSS or other RSS readers, we've found it works better to just add RSS feeds to your own site. Then your visitors can use those instead, and we can drop ours. Or you can let us keep handling it for you and keep those users happy — your call.

Open RSS has several safeguards in place to protect both your website and our service from anyone trying to abuse it.

1. Throttled requests - We limit how often we request your site so we don't hog its resources or overwhelm it with more traffic than it can handle.
2. Prioritized responses - We adjust our requests based on your response codes, respect your caching setup, and back off when your site tells us to.
3. No unnecessary requests - We only request your site if someone's actually subscribed to an RSS feed we're providing for it. Once they unsubscribe, we stop.
4. Tight security - We've got strong security at every level of our service to catch and block abuse.
5. 24/7 error monitoring - We actively monitor requests to every site we serve and step in right away if something looks suspicious.

If you're still seeing an unusual number of requests or anything else that seems off, reach out to us so we can look into it. We take abuse seriously and we're always happy to make adjustments if something's causing issues for your website.

Providing your own RSS feed comes with plenty of upsides, so we'd encourage you to do it. Once you do, we'll remove the RSS feed we're providing for your site and redirect all that traffic to yours instead. We don't care how you set it up, as long as it's a valid RSS feed with the same content as your website. We're happy to help if you need guidance, just give us a ring.

Before we set up an RSS feed for a website, our systems check whether one already exists. If your site already has its own RSS feed but you're seeing one from us too, let us know so we can look into it. If we're serving the same content, there's no reason we can't just drop ours and redirect traffic to yours instead.

Last Updated: 4 days ago