My Penny Arcade site (http://penny-arcade.com/feed/index-clubpa-1yRNVMaK) isn’t updating in NewsBlur. The RSS feed itself seems to be updating properly.
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Note that the site did work fine up to December last year - the change is pretty clear when I open up the site Statistics and look at the Stories per Month graph.
Were you a Club PA member at some point previously, but aren’t any more? I had a membership when it first started but didn’t renew. One of the benefits is comic/newspost right in the RSS feed, and I noticed I was still getting that benefit for awhile after my membership added. It stopped in December for me as well and I just figured they finally got around to disabling that feature for people who weren’t Club PA members any more.
You are not alone. It seems to be an issue with the Penny Arcade RSS feed. I tried contacting Penny Arcade via Twitter but got no response.
See this thread: https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/a-feed-hasnt-updated-in-4-months-in-newsblur-but-it-is-u…
That was the first thing I checked. I am still a member, and the feed URL in NewBlur is up to date.
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Same issue here.
Possibly related… I always thought those feeds were generated per-account, so they would stop working if your subscription ends, but your feed URL is the same as mine. FWIW, my Club PA account lapsed at the start of the year, but I resubscribed a week or so later when I noticed.
If anybody here wants to tweet at them or send them an email, this is a good link to send. Their feed doesn’t validate in the RSS Validator: https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpenny-arcade.com%2Ffeed%2Findex-clubpa-1yRN…
Emailed them just now
Another quick data point: I’ve never been a Club PA member and noticing this post made me realize that I hadn’t seen any for a while. So it’s unrelated to that in any way.
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Ah yea, this all jogged my memory that I did have to delete their feed and re-add it sometime last month. Once I did that, it’s working fine now (although having to click through to get to the content).
"Hi James,
Our tech team has looked into the issue and this is a known issue that some validators have with secure feeds. We do not have a fix for this at this time. Sorry about that.
Regards,
Mack
Penny Arcade Merchandise Customer Service
customerservice@penny-arcade.com"
I think there’s a general RSS feed for non-subscribers, but with lower res comics… I guess we’ll have to use that until the proper one works.
Hello thread!
My name is Erik and I own making sure the RSS feeds on Penny Arcade are working.
From what I can tell (link 1, link 2) many others are running into this problem and the bug is either in OpenSSL or Python. Honestly, I know little about either.
Certainly we can all agree that a service like validator.w3.org/feed (which hasn’t been updated since June 2010) is a poor indicator of what is, and is not, valid in 2016.
Samuel: I don’t know much abut Python, but it seems like this link might lead to a solution?
In the interim, I am looking for ways to place control back in my court and get this working again. I want HTTPS to be everywhere on Penny Arcade (which is why I made the change in December to redirect all Penny Arcade traffic through HTTPS instead of HTTP) but this issue might force me to poke a hole in our HTTPS coverage and let “/feed” URLs slip through. It’s something I am looking into…
I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread until we get it resolved!
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Erik’s response above is correct. The actual problem is that penny-arcade.com is fronted by Cloudflare which enforces SNI. You can verify this using OpenSSL:
$ openssl s\_client -connect penny-arcade.com:443
CONNECTED(00000003)
6870300:error:14077438:SSL routines:SSL23\_GET\_SERVER\_HELLO:tlsv1 alert internal error:s23\_clnt.c:769:
---
no peer certificate available
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 7 bytes and written 316 bytes
---
New, (NONE), Cipher is (NONE)
Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
---
compared to:
$ openssl s\_client -connect penny-arcade.com:443 -servername penny-arcade.com
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=3 C = SE, O = AddTrust AB, OU = AddTrust External TTP Network, CN = AddTrust External CA Root
verify return:1
depth=2 C = GB, ST = Greater Manchester, L = Salford, O = COMODO CA Limited, CN = COMODO ECC Certification Authority
verify return:1
depth=1 C = GB, ST = Greater Manchester, L = Salford, O = COMODO CA Limited, CN = COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2
verify return:1
depth=0 OU = Domain Control Validated, OU = PositiveSSL Multi-Domain, CN = sni74995.cloudflaressl.com
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
0 s:/OU=Domain Control Validated/OU=PositiveSSL Multi-Domain/CN=sni74995.cloudflaressl.com
i:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2
1 s:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2
i:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=COMODO ECC Certification Authority
2 s:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=COMODO ECC Certification Authority
i:/C=SE/O=AddTrust AB/OU=AddTrust External TTP Network/CN=AddTrust External CA Root
---
NewsBlur not using SNI has been reported on GitHub in https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues/534. There are more and more feeds which are becoming unavailable due to this issue and major CDNs. At least I’m assuming that PA has no control about CloudFlare enforcing SNI. Erik’s solution is also correct, the requests dependency on NewsBlur needs to be updated, which might require an updated libssl on the servers?
In any case an update to NewsBlur would be much better as that would fix the actual problem instead of PA serving unencrypted content.
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hey guys – i ran into this problem, and worked around it by using feedburner… basically create your own feedburner feed for your private penny arcade feed and add it to newsblur
Finally finished my big upgrade and now NewsBlur supports SNI feeds just fine, including this one. Thanks for reporting it!
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Thank you!