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.

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#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.

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#11

Here’s a short description of what happened on this feed:

  1. Jwz didn’t like how NewsBlur performed cache busting. I was adding a _=12345 parameter to the end of the query string when users force-refreshed the feed in order to bust the cache, but sometimes the feed would take that extra query string and return a feed with the address set to that cache-busted query parameter. So NewsBlur would diligently change the url to match, and that led to jwz’s feed permanently storing the cache buster.

  2. Because the feed is both popular and prolific, it had a rare condition where the feed would re-sync its entire archive (6,000+ stories and counting) when it had premium archive subscribers, and that took longer than the 10 seconds the add subscription request had to complete, so it failed, even though it technically succeeded. If you were to refresh NewsBlur, you would see the feed successfully added, but that’s not a very good user experience. I fixed this issue by only resending the archive when the feed switches from not having any premium archive subscribers to having its first premium archive subscriber, and that means the number of stories is much lower. The background feed fetchers will take care of periodically re-syncing those stories anyhow.

1 Like
#12

His DNA Lounge feed is doing similar.