Subscriber numbers should be sent in the User-Agent instead of an arbitrary/hub-defined header

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SUMMARY:

Hub should send number of subscribers in the User-Agent of a request to
update a topic URL.

RELEVANT SECTION:  7.2

COMMENT/REQUEST:

7.2 defines that a hub retrieving a topic URL SHOULD add an
X-Hub-Subscribers header to the request to indicate the (approximate)
number of subscribers to the feed.

HTTP headers are not always available for all users (ex: CDN), and
arbitrary headers are certainly not logged by most servers.  It's my
opinion that this section should actually state that a hub SHOULD list the
number of subscribers in the User-Agent portion of the request.

The reasons being that the User-Agent IS logged by most, if not all,
servers and is easily accessible by users and logging software.

Many examples of this method are available, including major feed aggregators.

ex:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 307
subscribers; feed-id=1569778631277988968)
Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 101 subscribers)
HanRSS/1.1 (http://www.hanrss.com; 2 subscribers)
FreshReader/2.1.09072100 (id: 413f3bfe; lang: ja;
http://www.freshreader.com/; 1 subscribers)
PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com; 48 subscribers)
etc.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jrossi...@gmail.com on 17 Sep 2009 at 12:03

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This is good feedback and inline with the industry. Thanks!

Original comment by bslatkin on 17 Sep 2009 at 12:49

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[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by bslatkin on 8 Feb 2010 at 11:17

• Added labels: spec0.3
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[GoogleCodeExporter]

Addressed in 0.3 draft spec

Original comment by bslatkin on 9 Feb 2010 at 6:05

• Changed state: Fixed
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