June 10, 2005
Ciao, FeedBurner
Let's say you decide you want to stop using FeedBurner. You loved the services, you loved the customer support, you loved everything about FeedBurner, but let's face it: you're going crazy with all the delightful services, and you've decided you can't take it anymore. You want out. You've always been able to do this if you run your own server: just like you redirect your feed traffic to FeedBurner, you can redirect your traffic away from FeedBurner. No problem.
For everybody else, however, when you start directing subscribers to FeedBurner, you may, in the future (way way way in the future) change your mind and want those subscribers pointing back to your original feed. You would probably also like this to happen automatically, and you would probably like some fallbacks for subscribers who don't get redirected for some reason. To date, there has been no simple way to do this. Steve Gillmor first raised this point with us during an interview late last year, and it has also been discussed more recently. We think we have the best feed management service, we think that providing publishers with the ability to do whatever they want is always the right answer, and most importantly, we think your subscribers are your subscribers, not ours or anybody else's.
So, beginning today, we're providing a detailed service for publishers who choose to leave FeedBurner. When you delete your FeedBurner feed, we have added an option to redirect your feed. If you select this, we begin a one month process of transitioning your subscribers back to your source feed. This is the interesting part; because of the very different capabilities of the different feed readers, we have to take a few different approaches.
Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 "Permanent Redirect" response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don't feel a thing.
Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that "Permanent Redirect" as a "Temporary Redirect". That's actually pretty common, so now we enter "Phase 2". Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a "redirect document". What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.
Day 21-30: You're still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says "This feed has moved to (feed URL here)". So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there's still a trail for your subscribers to follow.
After 30 days, your feed is permanently removed and any requests will receive a "Feed Not Found" response.
Here are some other things that happen during this redirect transition phase:
- Any item clickthrough requests are sent a permanent redirect (301) to the original link instead of a temp redirect.
- Headline animator requests get a blank image
- Any existing ads associated with the feed are disabled and result in a blank image
- Subscriber stats remain active throughout the redirect period so that publishers can see if anyone is still subscribed
Two points to highlight. We are only going to redirect back to the original feed (for example, if you had routed people from mysite.blogs.com to us, we will reroute everybody back to mysite.blogs.com). The potential support nightmare involved in trying to track down issues for sites we have nothing to do with, never poll, or have no ability to investigate is not something we can offer as part of a free service.
Secondly, we will enthusiastically promote feed readers to support Dave Winer's feed redirect specification. While, in a perfect world, a 301 permanent redirect would be the "one true answer", the reality is quite different. Providing a redirect document is a much more explicit intention and gives publishers the freedom to move their feeds at will. This mechanism currently works with NetNewsWire and some other readers, and we strongly encourage other feed readers to support this specification.
If you're leaving, we'll miss you. To our French publishers, au revoir. To our Italian publishers, arrivederci. To our Japanese publishers, we know how to say it, but we don't have the right keyboard. Everybody else stick around, and we have a lot more great features and enhancements coming. As always, hop into our publisher forums if you have other ideas for improving the service.
Comments
This is great. I have been avoiding FeedBurner for a long time simply because I was afraid that it might be hard to leave the service once I am enrolled in. But worries no more, I would sign up soon! Thanks!
JD
This is great, but complicated. I would do phase 1 from day 1 to infinity.
That is very thoughtful. What a great bunch of feedburners you are! You'll never get rid of me now :-)
Is "Feed Not Found" a 404 or 410?
Sorry, should have been more explicit: we send a 404.
It would be nice for the same feature when you rename a feed.
I actually *like* the phased approach, because it provides a usable solution while also encouraging adherance to spec. Let's face it, the time is right now to encourage feedreader authors to not ignore the real difference between 301 responses and 302/303/307 responses. I agree with Randy that it's complicated, but implementing a user agent -- a program that acts as an HTTP client -- is necessarily complicated, and the authors should adhere to the relevant specs.
My *only* problem is with phase 2, and not that it's a bad way to implement the intermediate step, but that the spec being used isn't really a formal spec. For example, there's nothing in Winer's spec to say *exactly* what the feedreader should do on a permanent basis with the redirect, and that means that what the feedreader authors decide to do might be pretty random. To illustrate, let me use an example:
Day 1: I redirect my FeedBurner feed back to my feed on my server.
Days 2-10: a few feedreader clients (let's call them clients A through G) hit my feed, and most if not all of them understand what the 301 means, and act accordingly.
Day 11: client H (a client that didn't try to get my feed at all during days 2 through 10, perhaps a desktop feedreader user who was on vacation) tries to get my feed from FeedBurner, and gets the bootstrap XML redirect reply.
Now, what does client H do with this? Does it update its internal database to permanently use the new URL for the feed, thus acting like the XML redirect is the exact equivalent of a 301 Permanent Redirect HTTP reply? Does it grab the feed from the new URL this once, but keep the old FeedBurner URL in its database, thus acting like the XML redirect is the exact equivalent of a 302 Found HTTP reply?
Again, I say this not to say that using the bootstrap XML redirect is a bad thing, but rather that the XML redirect method needs to be formalized into a defined, clear, unambiguous spec, the same way that the HTTP status codes are defined. Perhaps Winer wants to flesh this out himself; if not, perhaps the FeedBurner people want to fork the spec and provide an adequate definition of the expectations of user agents. Without one of those two things happening, though, the authors of user agents -- feedreaders -- don't have an unambiguous spec to use when writing their apps, and that will lead to the same mess that this phased approach is trying to work around.
This is very kind. I've already left Feedburner once, not because of Feedburner but decided I didn't need it, then changed my mind and came back to stay!
Just further proof that the Feedburner guys *care* about the user experience. You guys have proven over and over again that you're doing the right things for the right reasons. (And I hope you get filthy rich doing it!)
Excellent idea, and a great customer service move...I'm sure you will get eztra members because of it : )
A+ classy move. This is great. Thank you for doing this :)
Thanks! The best services are the one that feel comfortable showing peolpe how to escape. I mean I can forward my gmail acount... but why would I want to?! This move shows what a great service this really is.
Excellent. I've been using Feedburner and loving it and don't plan on leaving but it's nice that you guys actually work hard to even help us move out if necessary. Thanks.
Jason,
XML-level redirects are provided for situations where 301 redirects are not possible. They are a replacement for 301 redirects, that is, they are permanent and the rss client should update its database.
Eric,
Most readers will ignore a 404 response. That's because 404s often happen by accident. So, many RSS clients will continue to pound hourly on your server, even when you respond 404 forever going forward.
Some RSS readers will actually handle a 410 response and delete the URL or prompt the user.
Eric, thanks again for the community leadership you've shown. I've updated my little RSS Feed State article to explain some of what you speak.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rssfeedstate.html
Archive page bug: the subscribe button on the permalink page is to a 404 old .rdf link, not the rss links on the home page. fyi.
conrad: Whoops! Thanks for letting us know.
Any suggestions about consolidating all existing feeds into one feedburner feed without cutting off existing subscribers?
Thank you for everything feedburner.. looks like i'll be going now!!!
Well, hello! sorry, couldn't wait to come back again...
he he... :)
No, really - I like how feedburner really looks after everyone... your customer service is excellent and your support is impeccable...
Now, how can anyone ever think of leaving 'feedburner'???!!
Cheers,
Armand
Fantastic move! Very impressive! I have no intention of leaving, but now, at the back of my mind, it's comforting to know that I can if I want to.
No way! Not leaving feedburner. I find most important about feedburner is the prompt responses of the staff and its friendly forum atmosphere.
No complaints on my end.
Desee vivo Feedburner!
The useful thing for this was that I made the mistake of having multiple feeds for different locations on my site with the same content.
This feature allows me to migrate my users from one FB feed to another :)
So, no, not "ciao", but "ta!"
Update: Not quite as useful as I'd hoped. The only option is to re-direct back to the source feed. What I was hoping for was the ability to redirect to a different Feedburner feed. I guess I'm back to mentally summing my stats, as I don't want to delete the feed to lose the subscribers.
Desee vivo Feedburner!
great post! i've been scared that I would sellout to feedburner if I ever used their service. now i'm going to try them because of this article!
Yet another signup because of this post! :)
where i found my feed url
http://www.earning-on-net.blogspot.com/how to make money on net
this is my blogger site feed url
or
http://www.earning-on-net.blogspot.com/burnthisrss2
is my url
which url for my blog is right?
