The Ansuz Exchange Rate RSS service has been shut down due to extreme
long-term abuse and a lack of constructive user participation. Many people
were making thousands of queries per day - in some cases more than one query
per second - against a service that only updates five times per week. Almost
none of the visitors to the service paid any attention to the other content
on my site. Attempts to rate-limit users had very little effect, because
people would continue hitting the script thousands of times for weeks or
months despite getting nothing but 403 Forbidden responses. People posted
links to my service on Web BBSes and never mentioned who provided it, nor
talked about my other content, nor participated in my site in any other way.
Although it was meant as a demonstration of the Rippy library for people to
use as inspiration in constructing their own similar services elsewhere,
very few people actually did that; instead they used mine to exhaustion.
One person hired me as a consultant to help him set up a similar service
elsewhere, and then didn't pay me. Today (October 14, 2009) my hosting
provider contacted me to say that the load on their systems from abuse of
the exchange rate script had grown to the point that it came up during their
investigation of server load problems. They didn't ask me to shut it down
(and it's not clear it really was a problem; they just noticed it while
debugging something else) - instead, they suggested some ways to reduce
the load while keeping the script running, by cracking down more harshly on
abusive users. But I'm not willing to continue putting in the effort to
maintain something that brings me so little benefit; I'm choosing to take
it down entirely, at least for the moment.
If this service comes back at some point in the future, it'll be set up
in such a way that long-term users will be required to register and
participate in the other things on my site. There might or might not be a
demo available without registration. At such time as I do that I might also
be able to provide real-time instead of once-a-day data, because I recently
found a source for that. It will depend on whether I think there'll be
enough user participation to make it worthwhile.
For more information, please see my
Web site or send me
email.
- Matthew Skala
