NetNewsWire and referers

There has been some notice—at WriteTheWeb, Jason Kottke’s weblog, Jay Allen’s weblog, and probably other places—that RSS newsreaders are often guilty of sending a referer when no referer should be sent.

What I propose to do—and what I doubt anyone will disagree with—is to make it so that NetNewsWire does not send a referer when reading an RSS feed.

The User-Agent string will be revised to include the URL of the home page of the software, which is what some spiders do.

Unless someone talks me out of it (which I doubt will happen), these changes will appear in the next releases of both the lite and pro versions.