HELP! Can’t read your feed. Bad http result code: 403

  • Hi Angelo,

    We will be publishing our next episode tomorrow and logged into Podcasts Connect and see that we have the following error: Can’t read your feed. Bad http result code: 403

    Our feed address is (category podcasting):
    https://upliftconnect.com/channel/podcasts/feed/podcast/

    When validated on https://castfeedvalidator.com/ the feed validates ok. Our podcast feed was submitted and approved last week without any errors being flagged, note the last refresh was 16.02.2017 which was our approval date.

    Any ideas?

    Many Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    I checked your feed with our validator. Your feed when accessed with a HEAD request is returning a different content type, text/html instead of text/xml. This is a problem as iTunes uses HEAD requests to check for updates to your podcast feed. Do you have any security plugins enabled that may be changing/blocking HEAD requests?

    Thread Starter hgetrost

    (@hgetrost)

    Hi Angelo,

    Thanks for your response. Our iTunes feed is now Active again. I’ll run through what we’ve been doing here for your reference:

    I also submitted a support request to apple at the same time I wrote to you and their response was: “As I can confirm the feed is valid as well, we are currently reviewing this error appearing in Podcasts Connect and will get back to you as soon as we can.”

    Meanwhile I took on board your feedback and checked our firewall and server caching.

    Also using this tool: https://web-sniffer.net/ I can see the HTTP response header content-type is text/html. This is still the case and our feed is now Active … so perhaps this was not the cause? The changes I made to our episodes yesterday are showing in iTunes so have been accepted and propagated successfully.

    To test I re-submitted the same podcast feed to Podcasts Connect to check their validation and was getting the two errors: “feed already been submitted” and also the “”Podcast cover art must be at least 600 X 600 pixel JPG or PNG, in RGB color space, and hosted on a server that allows HTTP head requests”. The second was worth investigating. Checked that our artwork is within the required standards. After a while I clicked Validate again and this second error was cleared. Then checked our submitted approved feed and it was Active.

    So perhaps something was cleared at the iTunes end? It does not seem to be the content-type being text/html as things appear to be working ok again.

    Just thought to update you and let you know the details.

    Cheers,

    Heide

    Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    The wrong content type with a HEAD request usually is a problem during the submission process and iTunes. if your podcast is already accepted then it may not be an issue now. But it is a problem since a HEAD request should return the same information as a GET excluding the body.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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