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.
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.