AskMe RSS Bug June 6, 2006 11:18 AM   Subscribe

Is the AskMeFi RSS feed intermittently dropping questions?
posted by Melinika to Bugs at 11:18 AM (6 comments total)

I use Livejournal's syndication feature to manage the RSS feeds I want to follow. I've been subscribed to the AskMeFi one for quite a while now; the question posts are fed to my LJ Friends page, which I check regularly.

It's always seemed to work fine for me but today, looking directly on the site here, I see I missed a bunch of yesterday's AskMeFi questions. I compared the posts against my Friends page and about 8 of them never made it through the feed (all in one time chunk of a couple hours).

In fact I recall over the past few months that I keep running across older questions on the site that I should have seen before but I'm pretty sure I haven't - stuff I would have definitely read or responded to. I chalked it up to skimming my Friends page and not reading closely enough, but now I wonder.

Has anyone else noticed this? Here is the AskMeFi LJ feed.
I'd like to at least figure out if it's a LJ issue or a MeFi issue.
posted by Melinika at 11:18 AM on June 6, 2006


The feed only has the most recent 25 questions. Maybe more than 25 new questions were posted between refreshes of the LJ.
posted by mbrubeck at 11:30 AM on June 6, 2006


mbrubeck's answer is quite likely. There's a lot of crap that goes through Ask MeFi every day.
posted by danb at 11:40 AM on June 6, 2006


LJ's syndication feature kind of sucks rocks.
posted by Zozo at 11:49 AM on June 6, 2006


I believe the LJ feed in question is set to refresh every hour. Furthermore, I don't think AskMe has ever seen 25 questions in a single hour. However, I do think that the 25 post limit comes into play. Here's what I believe happened.

For whatever reason, MeFi was unreachable by LJ at the time LJ normally updates this feed. LJ, as with most feed aggregators, doesn't try to reconnect until the next scheduled refresh when it experiences an error. This may happen for several refreshes in a row for any number of reasons.

This probably happens relatively regularly, but in this case more than 25 posts were made in between the times the feed successfully updated. Therefore, you'd be missing the number of posts made in that time minus the 25 in the AskMe feed in your LJ feed.

There are solutions to this problem. If you should find yourself needing one, let me know.
posted by sequential at 12:08 PM on June 6, 2006


Thanks, sequential. I'll get in touch with you.
posted by Melinika at 12:26 PM on June 6, 2006


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