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 need to 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 browser, you can 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 need to go into the Feedburner Publicize tab and click on FeedCount, and then Deactivate:

 Then if anybody tries to see the counts, they will see this error message:

Go forth, and check your Feed Settings (and your competition)