Problem with The Icon Bar

#1

I’ve been subscribed to The Icon Bar via their Atom feed for a while now. Yesterday I realised that I hadn’t seen any new articles in NewsBlur since this one from 14th October 2019.

That Atom feed does contain newer articles, but for some reason they don’t show up in NewsBlur.

The Icon Bar also has RSS feeds, so I tried adding those. When I try to do this however NewsBlur says:

This address does not point to an RSS feed or a website with an RSS feed.

Only the Atom feed can be added, but even if I delete it and re-add it, there are no new articles beyond 14th October.

If I go into “Site Settings” and click “PARSE THIS RSS/XML FEED”, it shows a 200 response, e.g.

2020-02-16 10:10:12 OK (200)

…yet no new articles appear.

#2

This still seems to be broken…

The RSS/Atom feeds on the website are:

All four feeds load fine in my browser, and contain recent articles.

The site does implement rate limiting (on a per-URL basis, by the looks of it), so after requesting the same URL a few times, the server starts returning a 403:

Due to abuse, feeds such as RSS are restricted within a five minute period.
Please do not set your refetch value any lower than five minutes.

When I try to add any of the three RSS feeds to NewsBlur, this error appears:

This address does not point to an RSS feed or a website with an RSS feed.

I can add the Atom feed, but NewsBlur doesn’t show any new articles past 14 Oct 2019.

#3

You can check to see how often NewsBlur fetches feeds by right-clicking on the title and going to Statistics. At the bottom you’ll see exactly how often it’s being fetched and whether it’s getting a 200 or 403.

But here I can see that it isn’t even being loaded. I can fetch the feed just fine on my local NewsBlur (screenshot below), but it seems they are rejected NewsBlur’s production servers. You should reach out to them and ask them to allow NewsBlur to fetch the feeds.

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Screen Shot 2020-07-31 at Jul 31 5.13.16 PM.png1512×1448 451 KB

#4

@samuelclay Thanks for your reply! Is there anything about the NewsBlur prod requests that they would be able to detect and allow? An IP range, or a user agent, or something else…

#5

They’re not blocking the user agent as my dev machine worked fine. NewsBlur sits on Digital Ocean’s IP range, so it’s probably something in between. They would know more.

#6

They’re not blocking the user agent as my dev machine worked fine.

Good point…

I’ve sent them a message. Thanks for your help!