It appears that a few feeds are now effectively “dead”…unresolvable…to Newsblur. I realize you are investigating this, and it may be due to misconfigured security on the feed side vs the Newsblur side, blocking what it sees as the origin of Newsblur traffic. I would suggest (if you don’t do this already), that Newsblur needs to report to you feeds that were good, but suddenly, selectively unresolvable, throwing 403/404 errors. That way, you can see how widespread this problem is, or if it suddenly pops up after an administrator based Newsblur change.
If this is due to a configuration change, or server change on the Newsblur side, you may want to consider revisiting that change, and undoing it…
From what I can tell, based on the comments from Samuel and others here, it appears that if the website in question is behind a cloudflare instance, it gets blocked. I’m presuming it sees the activity as a bot and it’s just happening automatically. I’m curious how other online RSS readers are getting around such things.
I host a couple of feeds that are behind Cloudflare and they’re all working, so definitely not as simple as Cloudflare being the issue, but could be a configuration issue with Cloudflare.
True. I guess my comment was a bit more of a generalization and the Cloudflare portion seems to be a kind of common ground. I know there are a few feeds which aren’t resolving for me and it is quite frustrating.
I believe we’ve narrowed it down to specific websites having bots blocked to their /rss feeds. They can make an exception for verified bots to their feeds, which will need to be done on a per-publisher basis. Ugh.
Ugh indeed…what process should be followed to report this? They (the website doing the blocking) will need to be “told” what to unblock, and possibly how. Generally, their public facing customer service/contact procedures deal with level 1 people who may not even know what an RSS feed is…
What should a user tell them to allow them to unblock newsblur? What technical language would you recommend?
This may have to be added as a “help” message in newsblur when a site throws a 403 error…
I’ve personally reached out to one site, dailywire.com, and they “claim” they are “fixing” this…but I think based on what you have determined, they are not. They need to know specifically what to whitelist…what language/description should we use to accomplish this?