Saved stories inaccessible

I’m not really sure how best to describe this, but I’m going back to look over some of the stories that I saved weeks and months ago. Looking at them in story view or trying to load them outside the browser is returning invalid feed request, but the story still exists.

This feed link, for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/%257Er/ha…, was supposed to take me to this http://hackaday.com/2012/01/17/forget…

Is this because they’re too old, the feed URL has changed (or is no longer valid) or something else? Is there any way it can be fixed?

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Crap, this is a direct result of this morning’s URL encoding bug, discussed here on Get Satisfaction. I’m working on a fix.

OK, it looks like it should be working all along. What’s your username? I’d love to get this fixed asap.

I should add that this isn’t only for hackaday links, it’s happened for my Allure Media feeds as well (lifehacker, gizmodo etc) AND it’s not necessarily just age based, as this loaded fine.

Yeah, I would expect it to hit more feeds, due to the nature of the bug. What’s your username?

Whoops, sorry Samuel, missed the replies. Username is northirid. I just saw that other bug - I did wonder about that. Thanks!

So it looks like that URL got double-encoded… The original URL started with “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/…” but the tilde is an improper character to have in that URL and so it should be written “http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/…

But somehow that percent sign itself got encoded into %25, and so we end up with that URL. If you turn the %25 back into just a % (in both places), the URL works just fine.

There you go, fixed. Unfortunately, it was a gruesome fix, since the invalid URLs were stored in the database. But I just ran through them and fixed them for you (as well as every other user).

This has now been fixed. It’s running through and taking care of all other users, but I fixed it for the two of you here.

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Terrific Samuel, thanks for your help.