Why Quora Thinks I'm a Scraper: I Use RSS
As an RSS junkie who prefers the firehose to the filtering, I reached out to the folks at Quora not too long ago to inquire about RSS feeds. Specifically those for people's answers. That way, I could follow what the most interesting people on Quora were saying about things. Via RSS, I could read these thoughts in my news reader of choice. Although Quora didn't have RSS feeds at the time for this, the company implemented them. For me! What wonderful people, I thought.
But then...
As I took advantage of more and more RSS feeds, all of which Quora provides on their website, setting them up in my own RSS readers (both Google Reader and NetNewsWire, a popular desktop reader for Mac), I hit a wall. A wall called "503: Service Unavailable."
Apparently, there's a limit to how much RSS you can consume before you become persona non grata at Quora.
(Yeah, sorry. You don't get to see my open tabs and bookmarks in my screenshot.)
See that? Quora thinks I'm a scraper! You know, someone who has evil intentions to suck in all of Quora's content for my own nefarious purposes! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!
Except I'm not. I just like using RSS.
So what's Quora doing about it now? Helpfully unblocking my IP because clearly, I'm just a harmless RSS user and online journalist who likes to read Quora as a bunch of feeds?
Nothing.
It's been many days since I first reported the problem and provided my IP address so the company could "research" this. My request for a status update on the situation, sent over a week ago, has gone unanswered.
I know Quora's like, really really busy being a startup and turning down offers and all. But still. Weeks without Quora access? Did you really think I wasn't going to blog about this?
Here's a history of my exchanges with the team there, names withheld/removed.
Read from bottom up.
Please, give me Quora back! And please, let me keep my RSS feeds.
=======================================================
Sarah Perez ✆ to
May 16 (8 days ago)
Any update on this? I find this upsetting. I'm not scraping the site! What have you discovered in your research?
Sarah
- Hide quoted text -
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Sarah Perez <sarahperez@gmail.com> wrote:
[IP address redacted]
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 3:49 PM, <@quora.com> wrote:
Hi Sarah,
I'm taking over some things for , who forwarded your message along to me to see if I could help you out! I'm really sorry to hear that you've been having trouble accessing the website. Do you think you could let us know your IP address? Once we have that I can try to figure out what's been going wrong. If you don't know your IP address, you can visit a site like http://whatismyip.akamai.com/ and copy the numbers it returns back in the email. Then hopefully we can fix things and get you back on Quora soon!
Thanks,
User Operations
Quora
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 7:20 AM, Sarah Perez <sarahperez@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
Remember when I asked about RSS support for Quora? (See below for a refresher)
Could this be causing a problem with my IP address somehow being seen as a "scraper?" I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds from Quora now, including in Google Reader and a desktop news reader program. However, I'm not doing any scraping of the website.
But I'm getting this message on Quora now:
503 Service Unavailable
The server is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time.
Our automated scripts have detected a possible scraper from this IP address. If you feel we have made an error, please email info@quora.com. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks.
Can you please fix this for me?
Sarah Perez
On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 3:02 PM, <@quora.com> wrote:
Glad to hear it.
On Dec 17, 2010, at 12:00 PM, Sarah Perez wrote:
Wow, just like that? Awesome! Thank you, thank you, thank you! You made my day!!
Sarah
On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 1:26 PM, <@quora.com> wrote:
Hi,
just implemented the feature and pushed it out last night. Answer only and question only RSS feeds should be working just as you requested.
Best,
On Dec 16, 2010, at 7:37 PM, Sarah Perez wrote:
Thank you! Would be a great tool for journos and bloggers...
Sent from my iPad
On Dec 16, 2010, at 2:47 PM, <@quora.com> wrote:
Hey,
Thanks for clarifying. Right now we don't have a feed for just answers, but I can look into that for you.
Best,
On Dec 16, 2010, at 11:37 AM, Sarah Perez wrote:
This is what I want:
http://www.quora.com/username/answers/rss
Does that work? It gives me an error.
I guess profile RSS will do, I just don't want the feed cluttered with updates about new topics someone followed or questions they asked. I only want to track answers. Possible?
Sarah
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 2:21 PM, <@quora.com> wrote:
Hi Sarah,
I believe that there are RSS feeds on profile and topic pages:
http://www.quora.com/Quora-User-FAQs/When-will-Quora-add-RSS-support
Let me know if you have any problems with getting that to work.
Best,
On Dec 16, 2010, at 5:36 AM, Sarah Perez wrote:
> It's killing me that I can't follow people's answers via RSS feeds. There are CEOs of major corporations regularly answering questions here. Why can't I track their answers in Google Reader? Please!!! I'm begging you!!!! RSS!
>
> Sarah Perez

