FeedBurner OPML Exploit Fixed

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Did you hear about the OPML exploit on Feedburner that allows you to get a lot of subscribers? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Wondering how this works? Well you make an OPML file with your RSS feed’s link pasted a couple of thousand times and then export it to Netvibes.

FeedBurner used to count each one of the thousand lines as a new subscriber. And that’s how you could jump up to a few thousand subscribers within 24 hours. Not a very honest thing to do though. I wouldn’t put up a fake feed count because I’m serious about what I do and I respect my visitors/readers. Oh and here’s the post from the guys who found the exploit.

So, you wanna try this exploit? Well too bad. The exploit has been fixed. I tried it myself yesterday and it doesn’t work anymore (I did this to check if it has been fixed or not). The thing that is pretty amazing is that FeedBurner fixed it within a few hours. Now that’s fast. But, they should have made some kind of official statement saying that its been fixed. I guess this small exploit wasn’t very important for them.

Keep in mind that there are still many ways to fake the feed count. So, don’t count it as a blog’s success or failure. Try not to judge the blogger based upon that number. The more important thing is the quality of content.