Source: Burn This! - The FeedBurner Weblog
Ciao, FeedBurner. Let's say you decide you want to stop using FeedBurner. You loved the services, you loved the customer support, you loved everything about FeedBurner, but let's face it: you're going crazy with all the delightful services, and you've decided you can't take it anymore. You want out. You've always been able to do this if you run your own server: just like you redirect your feed traffic to FeedBurner, you can redirect your traffic away from FeedBurner. No problem.
For everybody else, however, when you start directing subscribers to FeedBurner, you may, in the future (way way way in the future) change your mind and want those subscribers pointing back to your original feed. You would probably also like this to happen automatically, and you would probably like some fallbacks for subscribers who don't get redirected for some reason. To date, there has been no simple way to do this. Steve Gillmor first raised this point with us during an interview late last year, and it has also been discussed more recently. We think we have the best feed management service, we think that providing publishers with the ability to do whatever they want is always the right answer, and most importantly, we think your subscribers are your subscribers, not ours or anybody else's.
So, beginning today, we're providing a detailed service for publishers who choose to leave FeedBurner. When you delete your FeedBurner feed, we have added an option to redirect your feed. If you select this, we begin a one month process of transitioning your subscribers back to your source feed. This is the interesting part; because of the very different capabilities of the different feed readers, we have to take a few different approaches.
Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 "Permanent Redirect" response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don't feel a thing.
Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that "Permanent Redirect" as a "Temporary Redirect". That's actually pretty common, so now we enter "Phase 2". Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a "redirect document". What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.
Day 21-30: You're still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says "This feed has moved to (feed URL here)". So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there's still a trail for your subscribers to follow.
After 30 days, your feed is permanently removed and any requests will receive a "Feed Not Found" response.
Here are some other things that happen during this redirect transition phase: - Any item clickthrough requests are sent a permanent redirect (301) to the original link instead of a temp redirect.
- Headline animator requests get a blank image
- Any existing ads associated with the feed are disabled and result in a blank image
- Subscriber stats remain active throughout the redirect period so that publishers can see if anyone is still subscribed
Two points to highlight. We are only going to redirect back to the original feed (for example, if you had routed people from mysite.blogs.com to us, we will reroute everybody back to mysite.blogs.com). The potential support nightmare involved in trying to track down issues for sites we have nothing to do with, never poll, or have no ability to investigate is not something we can offer as part of a free service.
Secondly, we will enthusiastically promote feed readers to support Dave Winer's feed redirect specification. While, in a perfect world, a 301 permanent redirect would be the "one true answer", the reality is quite different. Providing a redirect document is a much more explicit intention and gives publishers the freedom to move their feeds at will. This mechanism currently works with NetNewsWire and some other readers, and we strongly encourage other feed readers to support this specification.
If you're leaving, we'll miss you. To our French publishers, au revoir. To our Italian publishers, arrivederci. To our Japanese publishers, we know how to say it, but we don't have the right keyboard. Everybody else stick around, and we have a lot more great features and enhancements coming. As always, hop into our publisher forums if you have other ideas for improving the service. [Burn This! - The FeedBurner Weblog]
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