86 Labs

86 Labs wants to be a good citizen of the Internet, and we will work to ensure our user agents follow established best-practices.

yaRSSagent

yaRSSagent follows RSS feeds, and only retrieves a URL when one of the following is true:

• A user has submitted the URL as an Atom/RSS feed to be followed.
• We have receieved a "blog ping" for the URL from a ping aggregator.
• A URL from either a ping server or a user referred to an HTML page, which in turn referenced the URL via a link tag.

When acting on behalf of a user, yaRSSagent is acting the part of a browser, rather than a robot. When responding to a blog ping, it treats the ping as an explicit invitation to visit that URL. We understand that this interpretation does not have universal support, but many aggregator-style services (for example, Google's Feedfetcher robot, which supports their Reader service) have adopted it because often it is the only way to make their services practical. We are not quite ready to disclose any products, but we are facing similar practical considerations.

When an HTML page is fetched, we only scan for a link tag that points to an Atom or RSS feed - we do not otherwise scrape or harvest data from the HTML. If a link tag is found, we will cache the mapping from the web page to its feed.

Too frequent, bad requests, private feeds

We try not to hit servers too frequently or keep retrying too many times when something goes wrong. If you think something has gone awry, we'd like to hear about it. Please contact us at with the URL(s) and a brief problem description (or a long one - more information never hurts).

If you see requests for a "private" or "secret" feed, it means one of your users has asked us to follow it for them. If this is not acceptable, we strongly suggest you protect the feed through an authentication mechanism. We cannot guarantee timeliness, but to request that we purge the contents of a feed please contact us at , and be sure to write from an email we will believe represents a legitimate representative of the content (and don't be too surprised if we check with the technical contact for your domain, if applicable).

Get off my lawn!

We get it - maybe something went wrong with our user-agent and you just don't want us hitting your website until all the kinks are worked out. Maybe you are simply protective of your content, and you don't want some mysterious startup siphoning it all up until you see what's in it for you. Hey, our intentions are good, but we understand and we'll be happy to avoid your site during our closed beta. Please write to us at .