Version: (using KDE KDE 3.1.4) Installed from: Debian testing/unstable Packages This is a forward of Debian bug report #222555. You can view it at: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=222555 Here is a quote of the report. I have seen this happen myself too. cheers domi From: Lee Braiden <jel@ntlworld.com> To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org> Subject: knewsticker: polls too often, gets banned by slashdot Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 19:54:32 +0000 Sender: Lee Braiden <jel@tundra> Package: knewsticker Version: 4:3.1.4-1 Severity: important Hi, kNewsTicker very polls sites too often, ignoring its setting for how often to re-poll. I've been putting up with this for a while, but I just realised that it might be related to how the ticker is restarted after using a full-screen kde app, like konqueror in fullscreen mode. Anyway, I'm surprised it hasn't been reported/fixed already, so it's worth reporting, I guess :) -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: powerpc Kernel: Linux tundra 2.6.0-test10 #1 Fri Nov 28 19:18:11 GMT 2003 ppc Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C Versions of packages knewsticker depends on: ii kdelibs4 4:3.1.4-3 KDE core libraries ii libart-2.0-2 2.3.16-1 Library of functions for 2D graphi ii libaudio2 1.6-6 The Network Audio System (NAS). (s ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libfam0c102 2.6.10-6 client library to control the FAM ii libfontconfig1 2.2.1-12 generic font configuration library ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-1 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib ii libgcc1 1:3.3.2-4 GCC support library ii libpng12-0 1.2.5.0-4 PNG library - runtime ii libqt3c102-mt 3:3.2.1-6 Qt GUI Library (Threaded runtime v ii libstdc++5 1:3.3.2-4 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3 ii libxcursor1 1.0.2-2 X Cursor management library ii libxft2 2.1.2-5 FreeType-based font drawing librar ii libxrender1 0.8.3-4 X Rendering Extension client libra ii xlibmesa3-gl [libgl1] 4.2.1-14 Mesa 3D graphics library [XFree86] ii xlibs 4.2.1-14 X Window System client libraries ii zlib1g 1:1.2.1-1 compression library - runtime -- no debconf information
Subject: Re: New: knewsticker: polls too often, gets banned by slashdot Am Tuesday 09 December 2003 19:11 schrieben Sie: > kNewsTicker very polls sites too often, ignoring its setting for how often > to re-poll. I doubt that is the case. > I've been putting up with this for a while, but I just > realised that it might be related to how the ticker is restarted after > using a full-screen kde app, like konqueror in fullscreen mode. No, if you toggle full-screen mode in any KDE application, the newsticker will continue running in the background. Consequently, deactivating full-screen mode again won't trigger an update in the newsticker. > Anyway, > I'm surprised it hasn't been reported/fixed already, so it's worth > reporting, I guess :) I knew about this myself already, but thanks for opening a bug report for this: It seems Slashdot's check for whether one client sends an excessive number of requests is not so sophisticated: the "One request every 30 minutes" part means "Only one request of *.slashdot.org every 30 minutes". So if you read e.g. www.slashdot.org (the main site) and in addition to that something like developer.slashdot.org, or mac.slashdot.org, you will get banned, since after 30 minutes KNewsTicker will try to fetch the feed from both sites - which means you did two requests to the slashdot.org domain in less than 30 minutes. I don't know of any easy way around this, IMHO this measure is entirely unnecessary anyway: the traffic caused by the tiny RSS files which KNewsTicker fetches is usually about 4kB, the vast majority of traffic at slashdot.org is probably caused by other things, but not by 4kB files. Interestingly, no other site on the web apparently feels the need to introduce such a ban, slashdot.org is the only page which does that. :-( If you (or anybody else reading this) don't happen to know a nice workaround for this, I'll close this bug report. - Frerich
This weird Slashdot behaviour is broken IMHO, nothing I can do about that.