FeedControl

Detailed Documentation

The Open Door of Your RSS Feed

WordPress publishes your full content in the RSS feed by default. This is paradise for content scraper bots — they fetch your posts whole, republish them on their own sites, and earn ad revenue from your work. While you write content, someone else profits from it.

FeedControl gives you full control over your RSS feed. Trim content, add signature footers, throttle aggressive bots, fingerprint your content. Your RSS stays open for legitimate use — but the door closes for thieves.

Excerpt Mode: Content Trimming

FeedControl's most fundamental feature is excerpt mode. Instead of full content in your RSS feed, only an excerpt is shown — defaulting to the first 300 words, configurable to your taste. The reader sees the summary in their RSS reader, must visit your site to read the full text.

The benefits of this approach:

• Scrapers can't grab full content.
• Real readers come to your site — your ad revenue grows.
• Affiliate links and CTAs only show on-site — direct conversion impact.

RSS Footer Signing

The footer added to every item in your RSS feed: copyright notice, source link, author info. When a scraper bot pulls your content, your signature comes along with it. Aggregators republishing your content show your link — even unintentional backlinks.

The footer is fully customizable. HTML formatting is supported. Search engine crawlers can also see this signature — for SEO it acts as natural attribution.

Smart Throttling: Slow Down Aggressive Bots

FeedControl throttles RSS requests from suspicious bot user-agents. An average 2–5 second delay is added. For a real RSS reader (Feedly, Inoreader) this delay is unnoticeable — but for a scraper trying to vacuum 1,000 sites in a minute, it's a catastrophe.

This delay neither breaks your RSS feed nor damages SEO. Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) are exempt from throttling.

Fingerprinting: Invisible Watermark

FeedControl can add invisible character fingerprints to your RSS content. Single-pixel-height invisible elements, zero-width Unicode characters, or HTML comment-tag signatures. These are invisible to readers but easily identifiable to a forensic analyzer.

If your content is republished on another site, you can prove with a fingerprint match: "This was originally published on my site at this date." It's a strong tool in DMCA takedown processes.

Shared Whitelist with IP-Fence

FeedControl shares the same whitelist database as IP-Fence. IPs you add to the IP-Fence whitelist are automatically recognized by FeedControl as well. Single-point management — no need to make the same change in two places.

Specific Bot Protection

Your RSS feed shouldn't be open to every bot. FeedControl has lists of known malicious bots (content scraping bots, AI training crawlers — including GPTBot, CCBot, and others). You can choose to block these bots from your RSS feed.

This is a critical control for AI training data harvesting in 2026. Companies that don't want their content used to train AI models can use this feature.

RSS Analytics

The FeedControl admin panel gives you analytics about your RSS traffic: how many requests came in, from which user-agents, which posts were fetched the most. Throttling and blocking decisions are data-driven.

Compliance Notes

• ISO 27001:2022 — A.5.32: Intellectual property rights. Content scraping protection.
• ISO 27001:2022 — A.8.16: Logging. RSS access logs.
• ISO 27001:2022 — A.8.20: Network security controls. Throttling and IP-based filtering.
• COBIT 2019 — DSS06: Business process control management.