NewsBlur can't process feed, but W3C states feed is valid

problem
1

For the feed RedState the RSS Feed validation service at validator.w3.org shows its “valid”…with some issues…but Newsblur cannot process it at all

The feed in question RedState

Is this a problem with Newsblur, or the feed itself? Is there a way to tweak Newsblur to process the feed?

2

It appears other RSS readers can process RedState …I tested the feed of RedState with a different RSS reader, and it resolves properly. I find Newsblur superior in its choices and interface, and would like to stick with Newsblur. Can you take a look at this, and tweak Newsblur’s code?

3

It looks like another error 403.
So their servers are blocking Newsblur’s servers.

This seems to be popping up alot.

4

That is a problem that will wreck my (and others) ability to use Newsblur if sites start “denying” it access…

So, if I were wage a total, useless guess, its Newsblur’s great feature of actually parsing text from the story vs displaying the actual story…I’m guessing that’s a lot of hits all the time from a small IP pool of Newsblur servers, and Redstate reads that as an attempt to overwhelm them…or just sees the behavior as bot behavior…

Can this be resolved? Can you rotate IP addresses of newsblur servers, limit the “hits” on a newsfeed through caching info, or…something?

An RSS news reader that gets blocked all the time will not be useful…

5

Can you reach out to the publisher and let them know that they are sending 403 Forbidden to NewsBlur’s feed fetchers? I wonder if they have a lever they can move on their end.

6

I emailed them:

Hi RedState, I run NewsBlur, a popular RSS news reader and a number of users have reported that your RSS feed has stopped working. The reason is that you are returning a 403 Forbidden to my feed fetchers. The IP addresses of NewsBlur’s fetchers can be found at: https://www.newsblur.com/api/ip_addresses/. I believe you’re using CloudFlare and that the issue may lie upstream with them. Could you please escalate this to your contact there, or if possible, add NewsBlur to your whitelist? Thanks!

7

I also posted on CloudFlare’s forum: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/cloudflare-is-blocking-newsblur-rss-feed-fetchers/649373

Please post any feeds there that don’t work. I would appreciate all the visibility you can add to the post so that they fix the issue on their end.

8

Seeing the post regarding a corrected 403 error for autosport.com at 403 errors from autosport.com, I went back and rechecked the feeds RedState and https://www.dailywire.com/feeds/rss.xml.

Both still don’t resolve, showing 403 errors. So, if cloudflare fixed “something” for autosport.com, it did not carry over to the other feeds I just mentioned…they are still dead to Newsblur. (they are resolved by another reader for some reason though)