I've been fighting for a number of weeks to deal with a couple problems that really piss me off. The first one has been lagginess. The site has been super-slow, and I haven't been able to figure out why. I know ASP.NET keeps terminating the site's processing thread, because the server is under a pretty decent load.
The second problem I'm going to rant about for a minute is reaggregators. I've stumbled across several websites in the last couple weeks that are taking my content and reaggregating it, without citing their source or linking back to me. They don't even link back to me for comments! CommunityServer's support for these situations, like some other parts of the software, is incomplete at best. So I've been working on mods that let me regain control of my feeds.
So here's how I'm handling the situation. First, I'll be publishing an Terms of Use in the next few days that will outline how the feeds here are allowed to be used. The long and short of it is, reaggregation is allowed, but you can't take comments on your site, and you must site the author and link back to the original article in the title.
NOTE: Reaggregating excerpts citing the source and linking back to the site is always OK. Reaggregating the entire article without commentary, links, or citing the source is not. Not only does it mislead visitors, but I screws with my Google ranking, because the GoogleBot considers them splogs.
Second, I'm spending about an hour a day tracking down sites stealing my content. Their IP addresses are being tracked, and I'm reporting these sites to Google AdSense, as they are violating the AdSense Terms of Service. Google has been very responsive in shutting down their accounts, and I thank them. I've got a few other tricks up my sleeve, all of which involve CommunityServer mods... but I'm not going to talk about them so they aren't circumvented.
Third, I've offloaded the RSS feeds for the main site, as well as my blog here, to FeedBurner. They don't give me enough control over who isn't allowed to get the feeds here (although they said they are working on it), but they have a lot of fantastic features. What really sold me was the fact that they're redirect your feeds for 30 days if you cancel the service, which of course is extremely important. Your feed should be pulling from FeedBurner now, so you shouldn't see any interruptions in service.
The site is already running a lot faster... I hope it stays that way. There will still be some issues until I can do permanent redirects, but hopefully FeedBurner will move fast to add the features I need. I'm planning a couple more fixes to deal with the fact that CommunityServer throws an unhandled exception when it can't find a weblog to serve up an RSS feed or something, and Google keeps trying to hit blogs that never had content. I'm gonna return an RSS feed with a "this blog no longer exists" item for each blog that I've deleted. Since exceptions are terribly expensive to throw, if I stop them from happening, we should see a performance boost.
Ok, so now I need your help. if you come across any websites that are stealing content here, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know. I'll add their site to my list, and they'll get a different (but tasteful) message from your truly.
As always, feedback is appreciated.