The LiveJournal FAQ states

All journals on LiveJournal have an RSS feed, located at a URL of the form http://www.livejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss/, where "exampleusername" is replaced by your username.

Only the 25 most recent entries are displayed on this RSS feed. Protected entries are visible if the user requesting the RSS feed is able to authenticate with LiveJournal and has permission to see the entries. For example, if you view your RSS feed in your browser while logged in, you will see all your most recent entries in it. However, someone who is not logged in, or someone you do not list as a friend, would not be able to see any protected entries in the feed. For most RSS aggregators and newsreaders, this will mean that only public entries are included. This is because they generally do not provide any means of cookie authentication.

I can't tell which stuns me more the fact that LiveJournal implemented an "authentication" mechanism that requires RSS aggregators to reuse steal cookies from your browser instead of using well defined HTTP authentication mechanisms or the fact that they implemented this ghetto authentication mechanism knowing full well that most aggregators don't support it.

Based on my reading of the FAQ, a user has to login via the website then somehow pass the cookie sent from the server in the HTTP response to their aggregator of choice which then uses this cookie in HTTP requests for the RSS feed?  All this, instead of password protecting the RSS feed using standard web practices?

We just got a feature request to somehow support this in RSS Bandit but it seems so wrong to encourage this broken design chosen by LiveJournal that I'm tempted to refuse the request. Is there anyone else subscribed to a LiveJournal RSS feed that thinks having this feature (the ability to view protected LiveJournal feeds) is important? So far, I believe this is the first LiveJournal specific request we've gotten.