People can’t log in, those who can get logged in to someone else’s account, like I get to some Chinese guy’s account and could post in his blog.

Email subscriptions — the last remaining distinguishing feature of Bloglines — don’t receive emails (connection to mail server mx.bloglines.com times out), Bloglines’ support doesn’t answer the reports of breakage, and the Support Forum is 98% pet food spam and never looked at by anybody at Bloglines, apparently.

I’m still waiting for a reply that I sent to Bloglines CS six months ago when I first experienced a problem (the problem later resolved on its own).

Try to see it from my perspective. Like many bloggers, I am not a technologist. I don’t know a damned thing about HTTP headers and, up until yesterday, I had no idea that they could prevent an aggregator from being able to read a valid feed. That said, I do everything that I’m told I should do to make sure my site works properly:

- I use reputable blogging software
- I use a reputable hosting company
- I run my feeds through a validator any time they are changed
- I test my feeds against multiple desktop aggregators
- I subscribe to my own feeds so that I can continually see that they are still working
- I hired a developer to help me implement my last major upgrade

Yet, despite all this due diligence, Bloglines–and only Bloglines–can’t read my feed. I have close to a hundred readers who think I have gone silent for three months. I have no way of informing them what’s going on. And I have had no way of diagnosing the problem, never mind fixing it. Nobody at the Bloglines help desk responds to my multiple emails requesting help.

If you are going to implement features that are not standard in feed readers and that can cause Bloglines to be unable to read a feed, you should–at the very least–provide a FAQ someplace prominent explaining common causes for your crawler to be unable to read a feed, how to test for different causes, and what to do about them. Better yet, provide me with a utility that lets me test to see if turning the non-standard feature (in this case, “A-IM feed”) on and off has an effect on the problem. Best of all would be to fix your crawler so that a feed thattimes out will be rechecked without the A-IM feed request.

The bottom line is that, if a blog feed validates and shows up in typical desktop aggregators, the onus is on Bloglines to make it work with your service or, at the very least, make it easy for content providers to figure out why it doesn’t.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable to ask.

Many (most?) desktop aggregators don’t include this line. We include it as a courtesy, to try to help reduce bandwidth costs for content providers. And has been documented elsewhere, it does indeed reduce bandwidth usage. It’s unfortunate that it apparently causes an issue with your installation, and I’m sorry that it does so. But for the vast majority of feeds in our system, it at worst causes no harm and at best helps the content provider.

Unfortunately, right now I’m also having trouble with my hosting company and cannot exactly focus on my RSS feeds.