If you are using Icecast Streaming Media Server, you may not be aware that your listener stats are available to anyone on the internet through the Icecast Status page. This isn’t generally data you want people, such as your competition, to have access to.

Let’s say one of your stream URLs was http://streamserver1.mediarealm.com.au/demostream. If anyone was to go to http://streamserver1.mediarealm.com.au/, then details such as a listing of all of the streams running on the server, plus the current and peak listener figures would be visible.

Interestingly, I’ve found at least one major Australian network leave this accessible to the world. If someone felt that way inclined  they could scrape those numbers over a period of time and publish them.

Thankfully, disabling this feature is fairly easy. On a Windows Server running Icecast, go to C:\Program Files\Icecast2\web\ and open up the index.xsl file in your favourite text editor. You can safely delete the HTML from this file that you don’t want displayed, or even replace the whole page with a simple Javascript redirect to your real homepage.

Check the page again in your web browser. If all went well, you should be able to see your modified page. If you want to get access to that data, you can now login to the admin page with your password and see that plus more.

I hope I’m stating the obvious here, but please make a backup of that index.xsl file before you modify it.