Links to articles on The Verge get mangled going to Chrome.

Links to articles on The Verge get mangled going to Chrome.

This is a recent problem on the Android mobile app. Wasn’t happening earlier. I don’t know if this is a problem with their embedded link or something Newsblur is doing. If I want to read more of an article, I tap on the article title to go to Chrome. At that point, Chrome spins until it eventually times out.

A sample link looks like this…

http://www.theverge.com/rss///www.the…

If I trim the front of the URL to remove this part

http://www.theverge.com/rss///

leaving only this part

www.theverge.com/2014/4/25/5652584/jo…

Then the link works.

App version: 3.7.0
Android 4.4.2

7 Likes

This is also happening outside of mobile, in several desktop browsers.

Yes, this is very annoying. Based on the string passed to the browser, this must be something that Verge is doing, right?

Same problem with Verge feed, Chrome on Windows 7

Looks like it’s got to be something specific to NewsBlur. When I look at the feed directly in Chrome, the links are fine and open fine.

Sam? Any thoughts?

Also, I can confirm that the following are affected:

Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m
Firefox 29.0
NewsSpot on Windows Phone 8.1

It seems to only affect the “Continue Reading…” link at the end of the story. Links in the body of a story seem to be fine.

Same issues here. Viewing the feed directly and clicking the “Continue Reading” link doesn’t seem to be an issue. Perhaps this is a Newsblur issue and not a Verge feed issue?

As Josh points out, if you hit the header link or any body of the story link, it works no problem. Just avoid the “Continue Reading”

Easiest solution is to subscribe to the full text feed.

Truncated: http://www.newsblur.com/site/576138/t…
Full-text: http://www.newsblur.com/site/1039257/…

Samuel, it seems both of those feeds still do the same thing to me.

Links are still getting mangled. Any idea if/when this will get fixed? Full text and truncated feeds experience the same issue.

I get the following when I try to load those: There was a problem fetching the feed from this URL.

I see this issue on both full text and truncated feeds. Haven’t had much time to look at it but it looks like The Verge accidentally encodes the Continue Reading link twice, which most browsers seem to handle but NewsBlur (I’m guessing) ends up treating as a relative link, which gets prefixed with the RSS parent directory.

If you look at their raw RSS you can easily see the difference between a working link and the “Continue Reading” link that gets mangled:

BTW - I’m using Firefox on Windows and Safari on OS X. This isn’t Chrome-specific.

It appears this issue may now be fixed!

Hooray!