How to configure RSS Guard to block all cookies

Users of the open source feed reader RSS Guard may block all incoming cookies in the application. The application processes cookies by default, but a recent update introduced the option to disable this behavior.

The majority of RSS feeds can be read and updated without cookies. Only some require cookies, usually to access content that is blocked otherwise.

A user of RSS Guard noticed that RSS Guard was writing a lot of data to disk. On further investigation, the user identified the Reddit RSS feeds as the culprit. Monitoring revealed that three subscribed Reddit feeds were writing 8 Gigabytes of data to the disk in less than 24 hours. Reddit's RSS feed sends cookies and RSS Guard manages these by default.

All other feeds did not send cookies, which meant, that they would not write to disk because of it.

Note: All writes happened to the config.ini file of RSS Guard. Windows users find the file under C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\RSS Guard 4\config. The cookies section of the file lists all current cookies.

There is no reason for that, as the feeds update fine without cookies. Users may want to block cookies in RSS Guard to avoid similar scenarios.

Thankfully, cookie blocking functionality was added in a recent update by the application's lead developer. The feature is not enabled by default. The following section explains how to configure RSS Guard to block all cookies when retrieving RSS feeds.

1. Open the RSS Guard application on your system. RSS Guard is available for multiple operating system, but the Setting is available in all of them.
2. Check Help > Check for Updates to make sure you are running the latest version. Cookie blocking behavior was introduced in version 4.2.3 of the application. The latest version is 4.2.4 at the time of writing.
3. Select Tools > Settings, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-S.
4. Go to Network & web & tools.
5. Check the "Do not accept any incoming cookies" box under Network.
6. Select OK to apply the change.

That is all there is to it.

Now You: which RSS feed reader do you use? Does it accept cookies?

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post How to configure RSS Guard to block all cookies appeared first on gHacks Technology News.