Unsubscribe Request as an RSS Feed
There’s a bizarre thing happening in my aggregator that began over the weekend. I keep getting feeds with no title attribute asking me to unsubscribe from that feed. The subscription list uses the title attribute to list the feeds, so any feed missing the title tag isn’t on the list, which means I can’t unsubscribe from the feed. The feed says something about the server sending the feed not being able to handle the bandwidth demands anymore. It even suggests that we contact the site administrator to ask them to switch to a different RSS service. I wonder if the person running the third-party RSS feed has let the site administrators know s/he’s ending the feed.
So I’m thinking, “Why send a feed out each hour asking people to unsubscribe in this manner if the system can’t handle it? Why not just turn the feed off?” I suppose the person is trying to be polite by sending the notice, but it would help if the feed had the attribute that would enable unsubscribing. I don’t even remember subscribing to the feeds, but there they are. Believe me, I really would like to unsubscribe from this junk that’s filling my aggregator (it’s accounted for about 1/4-1/2 of my aggregator screen since it began), but until title tags are put in the feed, it doesn’t seem like I can do anythng.
Addendum 2/14: Titles magically reappeared in the three feeds that have been filling my aggregator with annoying, repetitive unsubscribe requests for about a week. (I unsubscribed successfully, so don’t go looking for them now.) I don’t know if the person doing the feed fixed the






February 12th, 2004 at 11:29 am
The problem feed seems to be The Laughing Librarian, which used RSSify for its feed. RSSify was having bandwidth problems and wanted users to use their own bandwidth. Unfortunately, the annoying feed messages only bother readers/subscribers not the actual RSSify users in most cases, the owners of the sites who created the feeds through RSSify. Grrr…
Those unsubscribe warnings had been happening for months, and I unsubscribed a month or two ago. That does not seem to be an option now, however, because the title has been deleted from the feed by either the weblog owner(s) or RSSify, and Manila’s aggregator does not seem to recognize feeds without titles even if they had titles before. The Laughing Librarian feed is now missing from the list of Harvard subscriptions, although people, clearly, are subscribed.
If nothing can be done on the Harvard end, I would suggest contacting the owner of The Laughing Librarian. Perhaps, they can add the title to the feed again (or contact someone who can)…It would be nice if this can be resolved. I miss getting my regular library laughs, and an aggregator filled with unsubscribe messages is not funny at all
February 12th, 2004 at 12:56 pm
The problem feed I linked to above is http://www.libraryman.com/blog/. I’m getting these messages for several different feeds in my aggregator. I’m not going to list them all here. I haven’t seen the feeds in my aggregator for a long time, so I’m a little surprised to suddenly get hammered with these unsubscribe notices. (I may not *read* anything in my aggregator, but I do try to skim it at least once a day.)
February 12th, 2004 at 1:49 pm
Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice that the title was a link. When I checked your aggregator, I saw the Laughing Librarian “posts” first…Now that I see that there are several troublesome feeds, I would suggest either having something done our end to delete the feeds (or, at least, allow these “no title” feeds to appear in the subscription list so that they can be deleted) or contacting RSSify, since the deletion of the titles (which must have happened very recently) is the source of the problem. The first option will probably be the most fruitful of the two.
February 12th, 2004 at 2:34 pm
same thing in my aggregator … and no idea what to do about it… I can’t unsubscibe because these feeds aren’t even listed in my prefs… Feels like someone’s spamming my aggregator… what should we do, wipe the whole list out and start again?