About change User-Agent format.

[StevenLiu]

http://www.xianguo.com/
is a very large chinese online RSS Reader.
the old User-Agent we send to feedburner is:

xianguo-rssbot/0.1 ( http://www.xianguo.com/; {subscribeNum} subscribers)

feedburner can not recognize this format well, some user have 1553 subscribers ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/ofblog/zhengzhi) but feedburner shows they have only 6 or 9 subscribers.

so we want to change our User-Agent format like google reader's :D

Feedfetcher-XianGuo; (+ http://www.xianguo.com/; {subscribeNum} subscribers; feed-id={feedId})

the test feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LianchunTech

have long will feedburner recognize the new format?

Thanks in advance!

Steven Liu

[whale]

Hi Steven,

I think FeedBurner isn't supporting both strings at the moment, and I am not sure if it is really necessary for Xian Guo to change its user-agent string just because of FeedBurner. This thread has been forwarded to the FeedBurner Team so that they won't miss it.

[StevenLiu]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

We just want to get a RIGHT format which feedburner can recognize. we can send other format to other sites.

Steven Liu

[Eric]

That's great news! Including the feed-id in the User-Agent header allows us to determine exactly the number of aliases a feed might have.

Of course, I'm not sure why we weren't reporting the correct numbers before. I'll look into that.

I'll add support for the new User-Agent string and let you know when we've activated it.

Thank you very much!

[StevenLiu]

I'll add support for the new User-Agent string and let you know when we've activated it.

I'm waiting for your good news :D

Thanks.

Steven Liu

[StevenLiu]

When will feedburner support the new User-Agent format?
I have wait 5 days already.

my test feed is :
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LianchunTech

User-Agent is:
Feedfetcher-XianGuo; (+ http://www.xianguo.com/; 17 subscribers; feed-id=395322)

Steven.

[Eric]

We have not pushed a new build yet. It's looking like the middle of next week for this to take effect, but it could happen sooner.

[Eric]

Just letting you know that we haven't forgotten about this ... it's coming!

[StevenLiu]

Thank you very much :D

I'm waiting.....

[pianoman19403]

Hello:

I am a web developer for AWeber Communications and i have a similar request Our company has just started reporting the number of subscribers in the user-agent for our feed/blog reader service. However feedburner isn't currently doing anything with the number of subscribers that we report.

I'm assuming that we need to notify feedburner to set up its user-agent parser for this to work. It might also be useful to separate different customer lists that subscribe to the same blog. Can someone please forward my request to the development team, and also contact me privately.

The user agent that we are now using is as follows where XXXX is the number of subscribers:

AWeber.com Feed Broadcaster v1.1 ( http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/What+are+Blog+Broadcasts; XXXX subscribers)

[Eric]

Quoting "pianoman19403":
Hello:

The user agent that we are now using is as follows where XXXX is the number of subscribers:

AWeber.com Feed Broadcaster v1.1 ( http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/What+are+Blog+Broadcasts; XXXX subscribers)

Cool ... can you just give me what you'd like to display as the summary for your service? Also, the source IP address(es) from which you're making these requests is important.

[pianoman19403]

Eric,

Can you please label it:
AWeber.com Blog Broadcaster

The IP Addresses are:
207.106.239.86
207.106.200.60

Lastly: If we have more then one customer that subscribes to the same feed-burner blog using our reader, how will feedburner count subscriber counts? Do you recommend we add an additional parameter to the user agent to differentiate between the different customer's subscriber numbers. Google calls this a feed-id.

IE: Customer A has 10,000 subscribers, Customer B has 10. We want the subscriber count in feedburner to be 10,010 and not something like 5,005 subscribers.

Thanks again for your quick response. Our customers are excited that we are adding this feature.

[pianoman19403]

Eric:

Sorry, forgot the summary for our blog broadcaster, can you please make it say the following?

The AWeber Blog Broadcast tool enables you to have email newsletters created automatically from your blog articles, For more details please visit: http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/What+are+Blog+Broadcasts

[Eric]

Quoting "pianoman19403":

Lastly: If we have more then one customer that subscribes to the same feed-burner blog using our reader, how will feedburner count subscriber counts? Do you recommend we add an additional parameter to the user agent to differentiate between the different customer's subscriber numbers. Google calls this a feed-id.

The subscriber number that you pass in through the user-agent string should really be whatever aggregate number makes sense from the publisher's perspective. Would you poll the same feed twice with different subscriber numbers? Then you should probably include some notion of feed-id. If you just poll once on behalf of both customer A and B, then I'd think that you would just sum things up on your side and pass up the aggregate number. It really depends upon how your system works.

[pianoman19403]

Eric:

Yes we would be polling the same feed twice with different subscriber numbers.
If we provide a feed-id, would your system use that to tell the difference between the sets of subscriber counts.

[Eric]

Quoting "pianoman19403":

Yes we would be polling the same feed twice with different subscriber numbers.
If we provide a feed-id, would your system use that to tell the difference between the sets of subscriber counts.

Yes. Just include that as part of the sample user-agent and we'll be sure to look for it.

[pianoman19403]

Eric:

We have decided to just sum the subscriber counts. This way its clear for the blog publishers, so we wont need to change the user-agent string in any way. At this point, we are ready for your dev team to setup the # of subscriber reporting as detailed above (i'll re-post everything below thou, so that everything is in the same place) Thanks again for your quick response. Please give me an ETA for when the change goes live.

User Agent:

AWeber.com Feed Broadcaster v1.1 ( http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/What+are+Blog+Broadcasts; XXXX subscribers)

IP Addresses of our servers:
207.106.239.86
207.106.200.60

Feedburner Label:
AWeber.com Blog Broadcaster

Feedburner Summary:

[Eric]

Sounds good. We're hoping to get both yours and Steven's user-agent changes in place for a push tonight.

[Eric]

Both of the user-agents mentioned in this thread should now be active. Thanks a lot for working with us to get that information in there for feed publishers! Let me know if anything doesn't seem right.

[StevenLiu]

my User-Agent is working now :D

Thank you very much!

[pianoman19403]

Hey Eric

I see that the changes have been made, but on one of our feedburner feeds that we have access to, I'm seeing the wrong subscriber counts.

For http://feeds.feedburner.com/AweberBlog, I'm expecting to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,800 subscribers, but today only 21 are showing up in our stats...

How does feedburner aggregate the stats? is it doing anything differently for email subscription user-agents then for feed readers?

If you need any more technical information, please contact me privately.

[Eric]

I might have messed up the regex there. I'll take a look. Thanks for letting me know.

[pianoman19403]

awesome, great... let me know what you find....

Just as a FYI: We will not be using a thousands separator in our reporting of the number of subscribers.

So you can plan on your regex seeing user-agents like this:
AWeber.com Feed Broadcaster v1.1 ( http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/What+are+Blog+Broadcasts; 123123 subscribers)

[Eric]

Yep, my bad ... I'm only grabbing the last digit of the subscriber count. Tomorrow's numbers should be better. Thanks for catching that.

[pianoman19403]

Hey Eric.

I see that the stats have changed on the blog that i'm monitoring.
However, now its reporting MORE subscribers then I'm sending it.

For http://feeds.feedburner.com/AweberBlog, I'm expecting to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 4800 subscribers, but today approx 5500 are showing up in our stats... any ideas?

FYI: If your using the stats from the http://feeds.feedburner.com/AweberBlog for your tests, you can expect to see the subscriber count that we are reporting for that blog drop down to approx 4200 later this afternoon.

[Eric]

And yesterday's number was 9783! I looked at our logs and found that there were three distinct grouping of user_agent requests:

4208 subscribers
4844 subscribers
731 subscribers

Do you perhaps have multiple servers polling your the feed with different subscriber numbers?

[pianoman19403]

Eric:

Ahh, I'm pretty sure i know what happened.

We sum the subscriber counts before sending them to feed-burner when we retrieve the blog. I posted a change in the mailing list feature that dropped the subscriber count of that blog from 4,844 down to 4,208, so that explains those 2 numbers...

Now for the 731 subscribers... 731 subscribers were subscribed to a blog that started redirecting to the aweber feed-burner blog over the weekend. since they technically have a different blog url, they didn't get counted in the summing .... I'll have to make a change to our system, to handle the redirects for the summing for subscriber counts so that we are not sending you more then 1 number.

Today it appears as thou feed-burner is reporting the correct number of subscribers for the aweber blog. it added the 731 subscribers to the 4,208 (give or take a few)

For now it looks like things are working as one would expect. I'll let you know when that change gets posted and If we come across any further issues, i'll contact you on here.

Thanks again for your help with setting this up, our customers are excited to see their subscriber counts reported to feed-burner.