My RSS feed has stopped working, and I don't know where to start fixing it?

Hi

All too often errors on feeds are due to errors on the HTML on the site the feed is based on. When you validate your homepage at
https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https://stillnsync.com/
you see there are 295 errors on the home page, many of them “bad HTML” errors

Unfortunately you are going to have to clean up some of the invalid HTML to get your feed working again.

Thanks, so… where would I find this code? I’ve looked through the files for the theme I am using and can’t find any of that. Most of those errors are complete junk…. looks like links embedded in the code of my site.

Code in WordPress comes from many sources – theme files, widgets, plugins, javascript to name a few. Often the sort of problem you have comes from plugins that break the HTML layout, perhaps in combination with another plugin. If you have installed or upgraded any plugins since the last time your feed worked you might start by disabling all of those and see if your feed starts to work. If it does you can turn the plugins back on one by one until you find the one that is causing the problem.

Another thing you can do is while you have those plugins turned off, validate your page again. If the number of errors drops significantly again you know you have found part of the problem.

To help in the validator, check the Show Source box. That will print the View Source browser view below the list of errors, with line numbers. The line numbers will correlate with the line numbers in the error messages. That way you will know what area in the code is causing the errors.

The most important ones for you to clean up are the ones like “does not allow a <p> (or <div> ) in this location”. Those are invalid structural HTML and can easily break your code and thus your theme.

Start with the plugins.

I’ve deactivated all of my plugins and nothing has changed. I still have 270+ errors and the feed does not validate.

Im concerned with the wall of junk and erroneous links. I don’t know where those are coming from.

Hi

One thing I see is you have at least several hundred spam links at the very end of your page code (in the validator). These are being displayed at height and width of zero thus are not visible to humans but are seen by Google, which is the point. It is possible your site and theme have been hacked.

Since the code is at the end the first place I would look is in your theme’s footer.php file, however if the hack is javascript it could be in any file.

Look through your theme files for any references to eval() or base64_decode(). There may be long lines of gibberish after those commands. Often times you will see them at the very top of all PHP files. If you find this you most likely have been hacked.

Yeah that’s the code I am talking about. Most of the errors are coming from that wall of text. I checked the footer and didn’t see it but I’ll look again.

Thanks for your help. They’re not in the footer, so the script could be anywhere? Awesome.

Thanks for your help!

Yeah that’s the code I am talking about. Most of the errors are coming from that wall of text. I checked the footer and didn’t see it but I’ll look again.

Thanks for your help. They’re not in the footer, so the script could be anywhere? Awesome.

Thanks for your help!

If you can’t find anything, if you want to you can email your theme to me and I will look through the files to see if I can find the bad code. Put all the theme files in a zip file and email it to me. (My email is on my website which you can find through my profile.) i don’t have a lot of time but I will take a look if you want.

Thanks. I’ve reported it to my webhost in case it was a hack. They said security needs to look at it before they can even try to tell me where the junk code is sitting. I’ll see if I can zip the theme up and get it to you so I can have a second pair of eyes.

Many thanks for your help!