only first 10 feed entries are getting itunes:summaries

Please post a link to your podcast RSS feed so we can take a look at what’s going on.

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for responding. The url to the RSS feed is here

Although I am replying, I don’t see my replies so I apologize if you see many!
Thanks again,
Peter.

Hello,

Have you had a chance to look into this?

Thank you,
Peter.

Sorry for the delayed response. Do you have Feed Maximizer turned on in the Feeds tab of PowerPress advanced settings?

Hi Shawn,

no worries. thanks for responding. Yes. The Feed Maximizer is turned on. Should I turn it off?

Thanks again,
Peter.

When the Feed Maximizer is on, only the 10 latest episodes have all of the tags. episodes 11+ rely on the description tag for the itunes summary. and the content:encoded is disabled as well. in iTunes because they do not display HTML, the description, itunes summary and content:encoded can easily appear to be the same.

If you turn off Feed Maximizer, remember to set your number of items per feed to something small, like 20-30 max. It looks like you have it set to 25 so that may be perfect without the Feed Maximizer option on.

Hello,

Sorry for taking long to reply. We’ve the changed you suggested and are now waiting to here back from iTunes.

Thank you again,
Peter.

Hello,

iTunes is still failing validation. When we test the feed using https://podba.se/validate the results says that it is still missing iTunes Summaries…

any further thoughts?
Thank you,
Peter.

I looked at your podcast RSS feed and I see all of the necessary <itunes:summary> tags. I’m unsure why Podbase has an issue. Are you having trouble with the feed anywhere else?

No trouble anywhere else… Just iTunes keeps rejecting it. No real reason why from iTunes so we have been trying these validators, hoping that if they say the feed is good, so will iTunes – but no.
The same feed is used even at Google Play with no issues.

When you say iTunes is rejecting the feed, is there a specific error message you’re receiving? Has the feed ever successfully worked with iTunes before?

It did work in the past and then suddenly stopped.
There isn’t a specific error message.. ??
only that “validation failed”. So I started looking other ways to validate the feed and came across that site (and others). I then went down the rabbit hole of finding out why that site was failing the feed. Now it seems like the feed is ok but iTunes still says it fails validation but without saying why.

My testing so far for your feed:
Feed Validator: passed
CastFeedValidator: passed
Loading feed in Google Chrome: passed
Manual subscribe of feed to Downcast on my Mac: passed
Podbase: problem with the iTunes Summary tags notice
Blubrry internal validator: returned “failed to download feed” error

Based on these results, here’s a couple things I’d suggest:
1.) Contact your web hosting company and ask them to check the feed URL and see if their server is doing anything out of the ordinary.
2.) Submit a support ticket to iTunes and see if they can give you more details on what might be wrong with the feed. Follow the link below and click the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. Please report back with anything you hear from either place:
https://itunespartner.apple.com/en/podcasts/overview

Just to follow up with some details…

You more than likely have the Feed Maximizer option enabled. If you do, 11+ older episodes use the <description> tag solely, rather than having duplicate <content:encoded, itunes:summary and description tags, this is to “maximize” the feed size so you can have more than 50+ episodes in the feed.

You can turn the feed Maximizer option off, but if you do, we recommend that you change your items per feed setting to the WordPress default, which is 10.

As for podbase not making the feed valid, please send me a screen shot at cio [at] rawvoice dot com, we will forward it to the podbase folks as that is an error. The iTunes spec clearly states that if the itunes summary is not found the RSS description is used, and if they have the same textual content there is no real advantage to having both tags in the feed, it just adds more text to the RSS file.

Hello Angelo,

We’ve checked the feed maximizer and it is definitely not on. We cut down the feed to 20, than 15 and now 10 entries. I will send a screen shot to the email above.

Thank you,
Peter.