BazQux Reader

Fetcher

BazQux Fetcher is how BazQux Reader grabs RSS/Atom feeds and com­ments when users choose to sub­scribe to your blog in BazQux Reader. Fetcher col­lects and pe­ri­od­i­cally re­freshes these user-ini­ti­ated feeds. Find an­swers be­low to some of the most com­monly asked ques­tions about how this user-con­trolled feeds and com­ments grab­ber works.

How do I re­quest that BazQux not re­trieve some or all of my site’s feeds?
When users sub­scribe to your feed, BazQux fetcher at­tempts to ob­tain the con­tent of the feed in or­der to dis­play it. Since fetcher re­quests come from ex­plicit ac­tion by hu­man users, and not from au­to­mated crawlers, fetcher does not fol­low robots.txt guide­lines.
If your feed is pub­licly avail­able, BazQux can’t re­strict users from ac­cess­ing it. One so­lu­tion is to con­fig­ure your site to serve a 404, 410, or other er­ror sta­tus mes­sage to user-agent BazQux
If your feed is pro­vided by a blog or site host­ing ser­vice, please, work di­rectly with that ser­vice to re­strict ac­cess to your feed.
How often will Fetcher re­trieve my feeds?
Fetcher shouldn’t re­trieve feeds from most sites more than once every hour on av­er­age. Some fre­quently up­dated sites may be re­freshed more often. Note, how­ever, that due to net­work de­lays, it’s pos­si­ble that Fetcher may briefly ap­pear to re­trieve your feeds more fre­quently.
Why is Fetcher try­ing to down­load in­cor­rect links from my server, or from a server that doesn’t ex­ist?
Fetcher re­trieves feeds at the re­quest of users who have sub­scribed to them in BazQux Reader. It is pos­si­ble that a user has re­quested a feed URL lo­ca­tion that does not ex­ist.
Why is Fetcher down­load­ing in­for­ma­tion from our “se­cret” web server?
Fetcher re­trieves feeds at the re­quest of users who have added them to their BazQux. It is pos­si­ble that the re­quest came from a user who knows about your “se­cret” server or typed it in by mis­take.
Why isn’t Fetcher obey­ing my robots.txt file?
Fetcher re­trieves feeds only after users have ex­plic­itly sub­scribed to them in BazQux Reader. Fetcher be­haves as a di­rect agent of the hu­man user, not as a ro­bot, so it ig­nores robots.txt en­tries. Fetcher does have one spe­cial ad­van­tage, though: be­cause it’s act­ing as the agent of mul­ti­ple users, it con­serves band­width by mak­ing re­quests for com­mon feeds only once for all users.
Why are there hits from mul­ti­ple ma­chines at bazqux.com, all with user-agent BazQux?
Fetcher was de­signed to be dis­trib­uted on sev­eral ma­chines to im­prove per­for­mance and scale as the web grows.
Can you tell me the IP ad­dresses from which Fetcher makes re­quests so that I can fil­ter my logs?
The IP ad­dresses used by Fetcher change from time to time. The best way to iden­tify ac­cesses by Fetcher is to use its iden­ti­fi­able user-agent: BazQux.
Why is Fetcher down­load­ing the same page on my site mul­ti­ple times?
In gen­eral, Fetcher should only down­load one copy of each file from your site dur­ing a given feed re­trieval. Very oc­ca­sion­ally, the ma­chines are stopped and restarted, which may cause it to again re­trieve pages that it’s re­cently vis­ited.
Do you sup­port push tech­nol­ogy?
Yes. BazQux Reader sup­port push hubs. If your feeds ad­ver­tise a push hub, Fetcher will sub­scribe for up­dates and re­duce the num­ber of polls to three times a day.
My Fetcher ques­tion isn’t an­swered here. Where can I get more help?
If you’re still hav­ing trou­ble, try post­ing your ques­tion to sup­port at bazqux.com.