Royalroad needs to stop breaking rss.
| 3 min read
Royalroad started injecting messages into the rss feeds a while ago. Always a random message along the lines of "you stole this chapter". Kind of annoying. So I got rid of it.
I used the css selector and css removal feature of Freshrss to get just the content.
Now they've made more changes that effectively kills rss for being able to actually read content.
A strict implementation of Anubis that requires a browser with javacsript enabled.
They now require a browser running javascript to actually read the post. They've implemented Anubis (a tool made to block AI scrpaper bots) without any regard for any use case where someone might not have javascript enabled. The anubis docs have methods for filtering to real users. Like special rules for rss/atom feeds.
What I think would be a better method for both protecting the authors and keeping rss available would be giving each logged in user token that gives them rate-limited access to feeds. rss readers don't need multiple fetches so a hard limit of let's say 5 fetches per author per day would probably give enough room for an initial fetch of a new story you're following and authors that work on multiple works at once.
While this last option does introduce work for the engineers over at royalroad, it's the option that I think actually solves the problem of ai, pirates, and providing better service to users. You'd think they're doing 2/3 right now but...
YARRR 🏴☠️
I'm not going to let perfect get in the way of good enough so I'm going to use the method that the people who royalroad are trying to block are using and probably have been using for a while.
They don't rate limit their app, but they do use a special "undocumented" API. They don't rate limit or require authentication to their super secret special API. I found it with a few kagi web searches.
I already run rss-bridge and rsshub. Rss-bridge is easier to add new 'bridges' to for me, as it's just php files in a dir. So ten minutes later I've got this new rr-bridge.php in my /app/bridges/. A docker restart later and I'm back in business.
So now I have the same level of full-text rss reader access that I had before but I have to use a method that's going to probably be fixed at some point.
More instructions for swapping out all current feeds to use rss-bridge in that repo readme.