Gamespot News RSS Feed Error

Seems like this happened over the weekend. I am getting HTTP Error (403).  I deleted the site and tried readding it " http://www.gamespot.com/feeds/news/ " but I am still getting the same error.

When I go to the site though it shows it working fine. Not sure if this is a communication problem between gamespot and newsblur or what.

Anyone else seeing this as well?

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Same here.  Was just about to post the same problem when I searched and found your post.  The feed appears to have broken on July 17 or so.

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Any chance we can get someone from Newsblur to look into this when they get a chance please?

Adding screenshots.

One more screenshot.

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Bump… can someone from Newsblur look at this please. I emailed gamespot about it as well. Looking to get this resolved.

Hoping Samuel Clay can take a look at this and see if it can be resolved.

Bump.Still not working.

Yep, same here. Seems to be a problem on NewsBlur’s site as I have no problems with GameSpot when using Feedbin and Feedly.

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I did contact Gamespot and haven’t heard back from them, but just looking at the RSS feed using a different reader… I see it’s not showing any issues. Still hoping to hear from Sam on this one. Thanks for adding your comments.

Ah-ha, I’ve been skipping over this one as most broken feed threads get solved with community help. Anyway, you’re getting a 403 because they are banning NewsBlur. You should contact the site, as they are giving a 403 Forbidden due to NewsBlur’s user agent string.

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Well what the heck. Why ban Newsblur. I will send over an email immediately and see if we can get this resolved. Not sure why they would want to ban this but hopefully I can get an answer to it for myself and everyone else in the thread.

Well, ok. I’ve sent them an email and commented on a forum thread, but I honestly don’t think that I/we’ll get a response. Guess I won’t be reading GameSpot anymore :smiley:

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I also opened a thread on the Gamespot forum and sent an email. Hoping we can get some kind of reason that can be worked out to make this work again.

Well, someone from Gamespot did respond to the forum thread. Seems that they find fault with the Story view and blocked Newsblur?! Copying the message so Samuel can see it:

I don’t know what Newsblur is but what ever they’re doing they are not playing well with us and they got blocked. We allow pure RSS readers but do not allow RSS readers that are also scrapers, i.e. they load the actual content indexed by our RSS feed. This is something that is against our Terms of Use and cannot be allowed. We’re stepping up enforcement after a string of morons using scrapers to re-host our content on their servers.

If someone at Newsblur wants to get in touch with me I can talk with them about how they can play nice and be allowed in. They can contact me at edgework (at) gamespot.com

Source

Thanks for posting this earlier for me Schntzlr. I woke up and was going to post it so Sam can contact the person and hopefully get this worked out. There has to be a common ground here.

Sam would you be able to update us here if you send anything off and hear back from gamespot? It appears they would work with you so that gives me hope.

Sam, have you had a chance to email Gamespot and see if there is a way to work this out?

Thanks for pinging me Justin. I just emailed them:

Hey there, I run NewsBlur. So I’d love to sort this out. 

I’m happy to disable your site in the Story view, although typically the way to do this is to block iframe embedding. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/X-Frame-Options for how to implement it in various web servers.

You can also block based on the NewsBlur fetcher’s user agent. They all identify themselves, so you can just block the content fetchers while allowing the feed fetcher.

Sam

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Awesome. Thank you so much Sam.