6 chapters across the catalog
A reported hack of Suno, an AI music generator, revealed the company used Podcast Index to target content for its training models. The generator identified 420,000 podcasts with at least five 30-minute episodes, attempting to download approximately one million hours of audio. This automated bot activity resulted in a significant bandwidth spike for the Podcast Index public assets page, consuming roughly five terabytes of data.
Jones details his struggle with "415 Unsupported Media Type" errors affecting the Podcast Index aggregator. After testing various user agents and IP addresses from Linode, he suspects Cloudflare is flagging the aggregator as a malicious bot, leading him to apply for their verified bots program.
The hosts debate the merits of requiring signed requests for HLS media to block abusive bots. John Spurlock notes that user-agents are unreliable signals and that proper identification should happen via authorization headers, though he questions if podcast media should ever be filtered or "closed."
Dave Jones describes his daily battle with bot traffic on the Podcast Index, often resulting in manual rate limiting and the use of 429 "Too Many Requests" error codes. He notes that most abusive traffic disappears once it is blocked, though some legitimate developers reach out to fix their code.
The hosts discuss the technical frustrations of managing WordPress sites, specifically regarding aggressive security settings that can accidentally block RSS feed crawlers. Mike Dell explains that many WordPress hosts treat high-frequency RSS hits as bot attacks, creating a "whack-a-mole" situation for support teams. This complexity is a primary reason why Blueberry is steering some users toward Podpage for simpler site management.
Blueberry's internal efforts to combat ad fraud involve sophisticated filtering systems to block bots and illegitimate traffic, particularly from programmatic ad networks. Mike Dell reveals that Blueberry discontinued its credit-card-free trial because bad actors were using it to spin up fake podcasts and hit them with bot farms to collect ad revenue. The company now requires a credit card upfront to deter these fraudulent activities.
