My guess is that the Newsblur fetchbot has been added to some shared list of malicious traffic sources and is being blocked by firewalls at the sites using that list. The fix would either be to identify and correct the list, or to have each site add the Newsblur fetchbot to an explicit allowlist.
Ok, I sent this to Raw Story and to National Memo. Raw Story has a support email, National Memo does not but I sent it to the sites founder. Since I’m not technically savvy in rss and 403 errors I have no idea if this will work or not or what to say if they start asking me questions. Alternet’s contact page wasn’t working for me.
Starting around June 30 a newsgathering program (rss reader) I use, Newsblur, stopped receiving your rss feed (site specific rss feed url was here). It is currently producing a 403 (forbidden) error for me.
Can you check in to this and allow the Newsblur fetchbot program to resume getting your rss feed?
I see the error for both RawStory and Alternet.org if I’m on my VPN … or just my regular connection … . It’s not working in Win10 (thru Chrome on the Newsblur.com website) or in Newsblur’s Android app.
See the attached screenshots. This started June 30th as near as I can tell.
I installed the Feeder extension into Chrome (RSS Feed Reader - Chrome Web Store) and both sites rss feeds look to be working ok in that.
Thanks…
On 7/10/2023 10:42 AM, Ben Nguyen wrote:
Hey Mark,
Are you still seeing the 403 ? That usually means you’re rate limited and clears itself after 10-15 mins but could also be because you’re from a region that we have blocked due to a lot of spam.
Yes, presumably the IP(s) from which the Newsblur fetcher operates. Repetitive fetching can look enough like malicious traffic to fool a classifier, which can then get a fetchbot onto a denylist that’s widely circulated.
In case anybody needs this, NewsBlur publishes a list of IPs that are useful for adding to a whitelist/allow list. Feel free to forward this url and the associated IPs (which are updated dynamically) to any publishers that need them.
Working, but still intermittent. I clicked on the “Parse this RSS…” button and all three downloaded new story’s a few minutes ago, but still a lot of 403 errors are happening. Any idea why? Does it take that long to propagate across multiple servers? Or something else?
Well, when you hit “Parse this RSS Feed” it fetches it from the app servers, which is a different IP than the task servers. So that’s why it works when you do it manually. But they’re still blocking the task servers.
I’m not able to contact either rawstory, alternet, and now commondreams.org… Is this a coordinated attack on leftwing news outlets? A virus? Anyone have a solve/workaround yet?
My “site settings” shows intermittent 403 errors for rawstory and alternet (I don’t subscribe to commondreams). It did pull story’s for rawstory and alternet this morning as I write this…