Contacting Aggregators

[Steven Roussey <sroussey@network54.com>]

Hi!

I think our forums have been picked up by some aggregators as I have seen
our XML Exports grow greatly as of late. We are used to maybe a couple
thousand a day but that has grown to over 200,000 a day this week.

And that got my attention. Among other things, I noticed that I have not
changed things for a very long time. On our site, for almost every page you
can add something like ;xml=rss to the end to get an appropriate XML
version. We did this before Netscape came out with RSS v0.91 so our RSS
default is still version 0.90 (you can ask for 0.91 by adding
;rssversion=0.91 to the URL).

Right now our help area says this about appending stuff to the URL to get
XML:

  ;xml=rss 			Netscape's Rich Site Summary v0.90
  ;xml=rss;rssversion=0.91 Netscape's Rich Site Summary v0.91
  ;xml=scriptingnews 	Userland's ScriptingNews v2.0b1
  ;xml=ocs 			Internet Alchemy's Open Content
					System (OCS) Directory v0.4

I want to switch things around such that the default rss is v0.91 and you
would have to ask for v0.90 specifically in order to get it.

The thing is, I'd like to warn our aggregators first, but I don't know who
they are. Is there already a mechanism to for aggregators to register that I
have yet to set up? Or should aggregators send a courtesy email to
webmaster@.. when they pull more than X number of feeds from a single site?

Sincerely,

Steven Roussey
Network54.com
http://network54.com/?pp=e