Mangled URLs on NewsBlur, but OK in Google Reader

For some reason, the “Comments” link in the feed for http://news.ycombinator.com/rss has a mangled URL in it, which looks like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com///news.y…

This started happening today. The same link is correct in Google Reader (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…), so it looks like either NewsBlur is mangling it or there’s a problem in the RSS feed’s syntax that affects NewsBlur but not Google Reader.

Could someone at NewsBlur please take a look at this and determine if the problem is on your side?

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Noticed that too, seems the feed is entity-encoding all ‘/’ characters in URLs as ‘/’ which seems … very wrong. From a cursory scan, it seems that is the *only* character that gets entity-encoded this way.

I’m going to say this is something messed up with the HN feed.

The encoding is very weird but it should still work fine.

Update: I found a work-around for this problem. There’s a nice Chrome extension called “Redirector” that lets you specify rules for modifying URLs:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de…

For example, you can tell it to trap URLs that match the regular expression “^http://news.ycombinator.com///news…*” and delete “///news.ycombinator.com” from the URL.

It works really well, but for some reason it didn’t start working for me immediately after I set up the rule; it took a couple of attempts before it kicked in.

Sorry, the URL to trap is actually “https://news.combinator.com/…”