The Pebble Reddit feed has stopped working

The Pebble Reddit feed has stopped working in Newsblur this week. The sub is still active, my other reddit feeds work fine. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/.rss

Any idea what’s wrong?

2 Likes

Looks like it’s on their end, it no longer validates: https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fpebble%2F.rss

https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fkindle%2F.rss doesn’t validate either, but it still works just fine and dandy in NewsBlur. None of their feeds validate, but Pebble is the only one Newsblur is choking on. 

Welp, it looks like they are banning the NewsBlur User-Agent.

>>> import requests
>>> headers = {‘Accept-Encoding’: ‘gzip, deflate’, ‘Accept’: ‘application/atom+xml, application/rss+xml, application/xml;q=0.8, text/xml;q=0.6, */*;q=0.2’, ‘User-Agent’: u’NewsBlur Feed Fetcher - 1 subscriber - http://nb.local.com/site/799/pebble-an-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/534.48.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.48.3)’}
>>> requests.get(‘https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/.rss’, headers=headers)

>>> del headers[‘User-Agent’]
>>> requests.get(f.feed_address, headers=headers)

I have no idea what’s going on.

>>> headers[‘User-Agent’] = ‘Feed Fetcher - 1 subscriber - nb.local.com/site/799/pebble-an-e-paper-watch-for-iphone

>>> requests.get(‘https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/.rss’, headers=headers)

>>> headers[‘User-Agent’] = ‘Feed Fetcher - 1 subscriber - nb.local.com/site/799/pebble-an-e-paper-watch-for

>>> requests.get(‘https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/.rss’, headers=headers)

Ok, I wrote up a test case and submitted it to Reddit. Looks like they are blocking the word ‘iPhone’ in the User-Agent, which NewsBlur passes to the feed because it’s in the title of the feed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/5iqz4r/reddit_rss_feed_404s_when_the_useragent_has/

Weird… thank you for looking into this so thoroughly, Samuel.