I've got an RSS feed that only needs updating maybe every six months, tops. Thing is, some readers insist on hitting the file every four hours, 24/7. And last weekend, one started hitting it approx. every 10 minutes:

00:28:52
00:39:21
00:49:52
01:00:21
01:10:52
01:21:21
01:31:52
01:42:22
01:52:52
02:03:21
02:13:52
02:24:23
02:34:52
02:45:22
02:55:52
03:06:22
03:16:53
03:27:22
03:37:52
03:48:21
03:58:52
04:09:22
04:19:52
04:30:22
04:40:52
04:51:22
05:01:52
05:12:22

That UA was:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36

But most abusers are:

Apple-PubSub/65.23

Along the way I added limiting directives with some effect --

<ttl>
<skipHours>
<skipDays>

-- but too many completely ignore them. So I've taken to 403'ing the worst abusers by Host/IP. And the most abusive one, above, I finally dropped via iptables.

I realize complaining about too many RSS hits is atypical because everyone wants the hits and stats. But what started as a convenience for infrequent visitors now just wastes resources.

Thoughts?