IE8 RSS Bug Eats Bandwidth

An Internet Explorer 8 bug, reported by Mauricio Freitas of Geekzone, has potentially serious implications for all site owners.
It's worth reading Mauricio's blog post about the issue he encountered with IE8 RSS.

Microsoft seems proud of its "New RSS Features for Internet Explorer 8", but despite Mauricio reporting to Microsoft that IE8, "instead of checking RSS feeds once every hour (or the time you set), does it hundreds of times per minute", and despite others reporting the same behaviour, the Microsoft IE Team decided this was a "won't fix". If you are seeing unusually large activity from this user-agent string you may want to consider blocking it: "Windows-RSS-Platform/2.0 (MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)".

According to Microsoft's RSS blog, the RSS Platform User-Agent string is used when the user is subscribed to the feed. The RSS Platform retrieves the feed content on a schedule (or on demand) - supposedly. It is misbehaving so badly now that its coming up on lists of bad bots to block but since it's only returned when a subscriber visits it would be a good idea to offer alternatives to your RSS subscribers.

Are you seeing a lot of log activity from this user-agent?

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