RSS feed broken / permanently cached?

  • Resolved bmoeskau

    (@bmoeskau)


    12 years, 6 months ago

    Blog: https://ext.ensible.com/blog/
    Feed: https://ext.ensible.com/blog/feed/

    Several months ago my feed stopped updating randomly. The blog has existed for a couple of years and I haven’t made any changes to code or the DB. I added about 4 or 5 posts after that time that never showed up in Google Reader (also tested in Bloglines which is stuck exactly the same way, which makes me think the issue is with WP).

    The most relevant hint is that the most recent post in both GReader and Bloglines is titled “Sourc{ 2012 Conference”, yet that post does not exist when you look at the raw RSS feed or my blog site, and I have actually deleted it completely from WP (and verified it in the database as well). In fact, that title had been changed a long time ago as well, but this old version of the title is what still shows. No idea why RSS readers would still be seeing that — makes me think that an old version of the feed is permanently cached somewhere.

    Things I’ve tried:

    • Changed all unpublished posts (made after that “stuck” post) back to draft status
    • Completely deleted the last published post
    • Published a new test post today (that never shows up in readers)
    • Disabled all plugins except for Akismet
    • Verified the feed in multiple validators as being fine

    I am at my wit’s end with this. I am a developer and perfectly comfortable editing PHP, checking the DB, whatever. I simply have no idea what else to look at. Any ideas appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hey.

    I tried your RSS the test post comes up fine. Here’s a screenshot from the latest version of Safari.
    https://imgur.com/DieiJ

    Ben

    Thread Starter bmoeskau

    (@bmoeskau)

    Thanks, but as I mentioned, the raw RSS is not the issue — it works for me too. The issue is that the version that shows up in all RSS readers for me is an old, invalid feed. What do you see if you subscribe to that feed in Google Reader or Bloglines (the most recent post for me is “Sourc{ 2012 Conference” and the kitten post does not show)?

    I also tried adding my feed to FeedBurner and it identifies both the posts feed and comments feed and asks me to choose which one to add, then just gets stuck on that step and never completes. This is quite bizarre.

    Ah yes apologies I didn’t read properly. I get the same.
    I may be able to fix this, but without access to your server I can’t do much. Maybe you could download your “blog” directory, compress it and upload it to mediafire where I can download it.
    That would be really good if you could do that because then I can see exactly what’s going on.
    Ben

    Thread Starter bmoeskau

    (@bmoeskau)

    Finally resolved this — apparently I got hit by a hack at some point. Noticed a big eval() script stuck in wp_config.php along with a bunch of garbage images in a theme that contained spam links. I’m not sure exactly why, but those links were corrupting my feed in a way that it still validated, but Google and other readers could not process (so I assume they were just using their last good cached copies).

    It was confusing because viewing the feed in the browser looked OK, but I finally was able to see the issues by viewing the raw RSS response in the terminal:

    curl https://ext.ensible.com/blog/feed

    This dumped the feed as HTML (not XML) and the spam links were very evident at the bottom of the output (I’m still not sure how it even validated). The fix was just to go through everything and clean up and delete stuff as needed. Luckily I keep everything in version control so it made it easy to pull the copy from the server and compare locally to see what changed.

    Hope this helps someone else.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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