The new version of RSS Bandit is now available. This release fixes a bug that causes the application to repeatedly request favicons from a feed's website in a manner that eventually resembles a denial of service attack. The new feature in this release is the [Top Stories] button.

The rationale for the new feature is given in Omar Shahine's blog post entitled Google Reader needs Mute. Omar wrote

Here is a feature that Google Reader needs: Mute.

Why, Cause subscribing to a lot of tech bloggers, a-list folks, and news outlets is extremely annoying when they write about the same thing. You get tired of seeing dozens or hundreds of posts about Kindle, Facebook, ThinkSecret and on and on.

These days I feel like my blogging info is like the local news (which I stopped watching some time back in high school).

So, please google, let me mute or mark read all feed items on a certain topic as read and save me the hassle of suffering through the repetition and pain.

The Top Stories feature is meant to target exactly this scenario. When you click on it, you get a list of the most recently popular items among your subscriptions. From there you can hit "Mark Items as Read" and mark all of the linking posts as read once you've gotten the gist of the story.

We don't have a Mute option where all posts that link to a story are automatically marked as read or deleted after being downloaded. This seems like overkill to me but would love to get some feedback from our users if this would be a desirable feature.

Translations
This release is available in the following languages; English, German, Polish, French, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Serbian and Bulgarian.

Installer
Download the installer from RssBandit1.6.0.0a_Installer.zip . A snapshot of the source code will be available later in the week as a source code release.

New Features

• Top Stories button shows the ten most recently popular links in your subscriptions.
• Twitter plugin enables posting tweets about news stories or responding to tweets in an RSS feed.

Major Bug Fixes

• Del.ico.us plugin silently fails when posting items with tags containing special characters like '#' or '+'
• Downloading feed list from NewsGator Online deletes local machine and intranet feeds
• KeyNotFoundException if "Mark All Items as Read" clicked shortly after changing the URL for a subscribed feed.
• 100% CPU used when an RSS feed with no <channel> element is encountered.
• Downloading favicons happens several times while the application is running instead of just once.
• The "Check for updates" feature would sometimes result in the application crashing.