If you are a blogger that doesn’t want to show off your subscriber numbers, take note: Even though you aren’t displaying the Feedcount widget, if you’ve enabled it at any point we can still see your subscriber numbers if we just know the right URL to go to.
For example, here is the URL to our main articles feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HowToGeek To see the Feed Count numbers, all you gotta do is insert “/~fc” right before the /HowToGeek part of the URL, like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/HowToGeek When you go to that link in your net online gate, you might see the feed count for that feed: I’ve used this trick to see how many subscribers many of my favorite sites actually have, even though they don’t display the widget.
This even works for people using the “branded” feed URLs from Feedburner, like feeds.mysite.com/feedname But if you are a blogger that doesn’t want anybody to see your subscriber numbers, you’re gonna wanna go into the Feedburner Publicize tab and hit FeedCount, and then Deactivate:
Then if anybody tries to see the counts, they will see this issue notification:
Go forth, and check your Feed tweaks (and your competition)
