Jwz feed broken, he's mad about URL parameters

problem
#1

The jwz feed used to be blog posts, but now gives just one “post” with content

<description>
<![CDATA[ unknown parameter "_" ]]>
</description>

Probably because the blog author was mad about weird URL parameters jwz: &quot;Just changed my WordPress installs to 403 with un…&quot; - Mastodon

Just changed my WordPress installs to 403 with unrecognized URL parameters. Let’s see how many terribly-behaved RSS readers this breaks.

When I checked site settings, I noticed that Newsblur was indeed fetching https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/feed/?_=3781 for the site.

If I go to my browser and view that ?_=3781 thing, I get the feed-that’s-basically-an-error-message.
If I strip off the parameter and just view https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/feed/, that looks like blog posts, yay.

When I change my Newsblur site settings to fetch https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/feed/ without the weird URL parameter, I get the error messages. I was reeeeally hoping I’d get blog posts.

Uhm, I’m out of ideas.

This isn’t too urgent; the guy relays his blog posts to tumbr, mastodon, and probably other follow-able things. So, not urgent. But weird.

1 Like
#3

Oh sorry, yeah it seems like Newsblur may be using a cached version of the old page that needs to be refreshed.

#4

Good catch, I’ve updated the feed to use the correct url and it should now be updating again.

1 Like
#5

I see blog posts now. Life is full of love and wonder.

#6

I do see all the posts appearing in my feed, but I also see an extra entry with the unknown parameter problem still. The error includes more now, though: “If you are seeing this,
your feed reader is badly behaved.
Use a different one.”

I don’t know if this is something that will go away going forward, but this entry is marked from 35 minutes ago.

2 Likes
#7

I also still see the “bad” posts popping up, even today:

Today, June 29th, 12:04

#8

Same. It’s still complaining about a “_” parameter.

image
image662×602 39.1 KB

And indeed somehow the parameter seems to have come back?

image

1 Like
#9

I filed sites rejecting _ (underscore) query parameter · Issue #1877 · samuelclay/NewsBlur · GitHub before realizing that folks were chatting about the same problem here.

Also seeing the errors in my view of the feed.

1 Like
#10

Ok, I’ve made changes (linked in sites rejecting _ (underscore) query parameter · Issue #1877 · samuelclay/NewsBlur · GitHub) to both strip underscores from feed addresses when being saved, and to special case jwz’s site so that we never send underscores to it when forcing a refresh.