HTTP 2.0 support

question
1

Hiya, I’m running into an issue with the Dumbing Of Age comic’s RSS feed https://www.dumbingofage.com/feed/ where NewsBlur is reporting that it has been getting HTTP Error (426) errors for the last few days now.

It looks like the site no longer responds to HTTP/1.1 requests, and is sending 426s as responses for them instead. HTTP/2.0 requests work fine! (I was able to confirm this with curl)

However, the HTML of the 426 page only mentions that you need to access it via HTTPS (which I am), and is not sending the required Upgrade header to let clients know they must access it via HTTP/2.0 now.

So I guess my questions are:

  1. Does NewsBlur support using http2 connections to retrieve feeds?
  2. If not, could it be added?
  3. If so, is it the missing Upgrade header causing this one to fail? I’m going to try to reach out to the webcomic author to inform them, but maybe you could add it to a list of forced http2 connections?
2

NewsBlur only spoke HTTP/1.1 when fetching feeds, and Dumbing of Age’s server started refusing HTTP/1.1 with that 426 a few days ago. The error page is misleading since it has nothing to do with SSL, and the missing Upgrade header didn’t matter because NewsBlur never looked at it. HTTP/2 works fine, so I added a fallback: when a feed answers with a 426, NewsBlur now retries it over HTTP/2. That fixes Dumbing of Age and It’s Walky, which has the same setup, plus a few other feeds doing the same thing. It’ll be live in the next deploy and the feed will catch up on its next fetch. Still worth letting the author know, since other readers will hit the same wall.

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