Right, so, one of the things that can happen when you're trying to collect fresh data on the behaviors of something dynamic is that you get bogged down under the load of what happened previously. With the feed reader score project, this is what's been happening. A lot of clients were started up and pointed at it, and we gathered a lot of behavioral data.
The problem is that some of them are not changing, and having a few dozen of them call back every five minutes is not doing anyone any favors. So, I did what I promised I would do, and I updated the hostname.
If you are participating in the test and want to continue, go back to the original mail from me you got with the code(s), and load the instruction page. There, you will find the very slightly changed base hostname that can be used to construct your new unique feed URL. The keys are the same.
This also gives us the benefit of seeing what a fresh start looks like with the latest batch of feed reader software. Many of them have done a lot of excellent work these past six months, and they deserve to leave the historical baggage behind. I want to see where they are now, and this is how we get there.
For anyone wondering, I was looking at some of the reports before I cleared things out a few minutes ago. Some of the problem spots that I had mentioned in multiple report posts were still there. A lot of this was just people running old versions when they really need to upgrade. Some of it was just nobody at the wheel for the various clown services.
Seeing a whole bunch of unchanged behavior just reinforced the need to do a fresh start on this stuff. The people who have invested in improving their software deserve it.
Once there's a fresh set of data built up, I guess I'll write up another summary.
Oh, side note for anyone keeping track: this is not the "wildcard DNS" thing that I mentioned a few weeks back that would be needed to track down the *really* goofy stuff that polls all kinds of extra crap paths. That would require (more) actual work, and I'm not ready to do that just yet. (Plus, for that kind of effort, I might want to charge for it. Just saying.)
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