I added error messages when subscribing to an RSS feed in the News tool. Before, if a feed was invalid or unavailable, no message would come back. Now there is an appropriately worded message.

One of the problems I have encountered is that some hosting providers, like AOL, block requests that look like they are coming from LWP or some other library to prevent spam or abuse. In general, that probably works well for them. However, when it comes to exporting RSS feeds, their security needs to be a little more lax since there are many valid reasons for using scripts to read feeds and not a whole lot of spam activity related to simply reading an RSS feed. To put it simply, the purpose of an RSS feed is to make the information available to everyone, so don't slap a bunch of general purpose security on it.

Originally posted in the Sitemason Developers Google Group on Tue, 18 May 2010