4 chapters across the catalog
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.
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.
