Rachel Kroll
Earlier, someone wrote in saying "the RSS feed seems to be broken", but didn't leave any contact info. All I have is an IP address and whatever the web server logged. Let's just see what we got here, and see what's broken and what isn't.
xx:01:29 : requests feed over http with no conditional headers (If-Modified-Since, If-None-Match). Receives entire feed as a result. Expected behavior for first fetch.
xx:03:53 : requests feed over http again... with no conditional headers. It's been a hair over two minutes. The server rejects it with a 429 "Too Many Requests". Strong signal for a broken feed reader.
xx:20:37 : third request over http with no conditional headers (so it wants the unchanged feed again, 19 minutes later). Rejected the same way.
Then things pivot and hit the "secure" side of the site. I treat them differently for the purposes of throttling, or very bad things would happen to feed aggregator places which subscribe to both versions of the feed.
xx:21:46 : requests feed over https. Sends no conditional headers. Receives entire feed since it's specifically rigged to not care about the earlier http traffic.
xx:22:04 : requests feed over https again. Sends no conditional headers despite receiving entire feed 18 seconds earlier. Is rejected with a 429.
xx:22:11 : requests feed over https a third time, again with no conditional headers. Is rejected with a 429 again.
xx:22:18 : fourth request over https, again no conditional headers, is again thrown in the bit bucket with a 429.
xx:23:13 : fifth request over https, still no conditional headers. Gets 429.
I'd say things are working perfectly... here. There's a feed reader involved which doesn't send conditional requests, doesn't throttle on a 429, and doesn't surface HTTP failure codes to the user, but I have no control over that.