AskMe RSS Bug?

November 15, 2006 1:40 PM

Er, is there a problem with the AskMe RSS feed? I haven't gotten anything in at least two days, despite MeFi and MeTa feeds working fine.

I'm viewing in Google Reader, if that matters.
posted by Chrysostom to Bugs at 1:40 PM (10 comments total)

Working fine for me on Bloglines.
posted by saturnine at 3:36 PM on November 15, 2006

updated in Firefox/ Sage, too. Clear your cache, or jiggle the handle.
posted by boo_radley at 3:57 PM on November 15, 2006

My RSS for anon askme's been broken for weeks. Thunderbird simply thinks there's nothing new. All my other subs work.
posted by klangklangston at 4:00 PM on November 15, 2006

I've noticed this also. Bloglines, fine. Google Reader, not.
posted by gnomeloaf at 4:27 PM on November 15, 2006

I changed the way pubDate/lastBuildDate info was done in feeds a couple weeks ago, in an effort to fix Google Reader's non-updating of feeds (the pubDate/lastBuildDate is optional but Google requires it apparently), but that didn't seem to solve it.

I'll ask the Google people I know to see if they can figure it out.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:41 PM on November 15, 2006

I've been seeing the Asks in Google Reader just fine and haven't noticed any breaks-in-service.
posted by SenshiNeko at 8:10 PM on November 15, 2006

thanks matt -- I've posted two messages about it on the reader newsgroup with no response (and there's already one or two regarding the mefi there). The google stuff seems to have gotten a *little* better as of late -- I usually get updates every 8 hours or so, whereas before it was once a day. Indeed, the pubDate stuff did not help google at all, but it's nice to know bloglines works now.

I suspect it is related to the way google is dealing with caching. You can't *refresh* the feed, from what I've read, because you're just refreshing from googles cached copy -- it's also possible that any breakage, downtime or slow response results in google not refreshing the cache on its own.

my guess is the answer is somewhere in between the way the ask me feed is sent and the way google is getting it. none of my other google feeds behave this way, but everyone said the same thing when ask.me wasn't working in bloglines before, so take that with a grain of salt.
posted by fishfucker at 10:53 PM on November 15, 2006

Yeah, I'm having the same problem - nothing for a couple of days, then 100+ questions all at once. It's just like The Bloglines Problem, though that now appears to have been solved. It also happens, to a lesser extent, with MeTa - I get 3/4 posts at once, not as they appear on the site.

I'm going to try mirroring the feed and subscribing to that to rule out any server problems as being the cause.
posted by blag at 5:50 AM on November 16, 2006

In case anyone is still reading this thread: mirroring the feed solved the problem completely. I grab the xml file with curl via cron every 15 minutes and subscribe to the mirrored feed. Everything updates as it should - new AskMe posts arrive in Google Reader in small batches of 3-5, not huge chunks of 50-60.

Since the AskMe XML file works fine from another server, I guess this means the MeFi server is causing (at least part of) the problem?
posted by blag at 3:51 PM on November 19, 2006

that sounds reasonable. maybe google has a long wait time if it fails to retrieve the xml file.

anyways, I'll probably just do what you're doing. mirror it on a server. that'd solve my problem.
posted by fishfucker at 10:24 AM on November 20, 2006