RSS Feed Problems

Does anyone else have this problem?

These feeds work fine for me:

Alternative Breaking News
General Conspiracies
Paranormal Studies
Philosophy and Metaphysics
Religion, Faith and Theology
Secret Societies



Survival and Conspiracies in Religions will only display a small number of threads, 7 and 3 respectively, instead of the initial 10 that the other RSS feeds start with.

The Secret Societies feed will be accepted by my software (Thunderbird) but will not display any threads.

And finally, the Ancient and Lost Cilivizations feed is not even accepted by Thunderbird as a valid RSS feed. Thunderbird says that the link provided by ATS is not a valid RSS feed.


Is this a problem on ATS's side of things, or my side of things? Is anyone else having these problems?

I wasn't aware that there were multiple feeds. I have just the one:

feeds.abovetopsecret.com...

It seems to pick up everything, including 404'd threads.

Yes, on this page you can find RSS links to every forum:

www.abovetopsecret.com...


I don't want an RSS feed of everything posted here. I'm only interested in some subjects. Thunderbird organizes all of these feeds for me into separate folders, so I can just click from one to another to see what's being discussed. The one I'm really interested in is the ancient civilizations forum. But that's one of the few that for me, does not work at all.

a reply to: BridgebyaFountain

Well, hopefully they'll get that straightened out for you, sorry for your troubles. I use RSS for a different reason, and need feeds from all threads.

Well I figured something out about it.

The Secret Societies RSS feed, which was initially blank, added a thread today to its list. So I'm assuming that the ATS RSS feeds work this way:

After being added, they add up to 10 threads, but they must be threads that were posted within a certain recent period of time, or else less show up, even 0.

However, this is NOT the problem with the Ancient & Lost Civilizations feed, because that feed simply does not work. Thunderbird rejects the URL that ATS gives as an invalid RSS feed.

a reply to: BridgebyaFountain

However, this is NOT the problem with the Ancient & Lost Civilizations feed, because that feed simply does not work. Thunderbird rejects the URL that ATS gives as an invalid RSS feed.

That's weird, because I added it as a feed to Apple Mail and it's working for me:



I wonder if Thunderbird is rejecting it because of those funky characters in the thread title of the first one listed there. You might try another RSS client.

a reply to: BridgebyaFountain

Sounds like an issue with Thunderbird...

a reply to: adjensen

I tried Akregator and it's not working either, just says that it's an invalid feed. I'm on Linux too. I hope that isn't the problem.


Can someone try one thing for me?

See if feed link lists threads:

feeds.abovetopsecret.com...



Then see if this one lists threads (Ancient & Lost Civilizations):

feeds.abovetopsecret.com...


Firefox isn't even showing any threads listed on the 2nd link for me. But the first one does.

Good news, I've found the problem for you and it is indeed on ATS's side of things.


Here is a Feed Validation Service from W3C:

validator.w3.org...


I tested the two feeds I linked to above, and here were the results it gave me.

First, for the Breaking Alternative News feed:

Congratulations!

[Valid RSS] This is a valid RSS feed.

Recommendations

This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.

Your feed appears to be encoded as "utf-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]

Then for the Ancient & Lost Civilizations feed (feeds.abovetopsecret.com...):

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 4, column 49: XML parsing error: :4:49: not well-formed (invalid token) [help]

AboveTopSecret.com New Topics In Ancient & Lost Civilizations
^

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

Your feed appears to be encoded as "utf-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]

The error it points out specifically (the formatting will probably screw it up in this post) is directly underneath the space following the "&" symbol in the title.


Just to check to see if the problem was with the "&" symbol in the title of the feed, I checked another forum with this symbol in its RSS feed, "Politicians & People" (feeds.abovetopsecret.com...). Guess what?

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 4, column 53: XML parsing error: :4:53: not well-formed (invalid token) [help]

AboveTopSecret.com New Topics In Politicians & People
^

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

Your feed appears to be encoded as "utf-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]

Once again the error is pinpointed to directly after the "&" symbol in the feed title. Try the service yourself above, it's the first link in this post.


So the problem isn't on my end. Instead of asking why Thunderbird and Akregator won't handle it, I would ask how Apple's software works that it does handle it, because it must be handling the code in a different way.


I tried three more RSS feed validators:

feedvalidator.org...
friendfeed.com...
carp.docs.geckotribe.com...

The first and third of these gave me the same thing as the one above: an error relating to the "&" symbol. The second one above did not give this error. Again there must be some kind of discrepancy in how the feeds are being handled, but the problem preventing me and the other three RSS validators from accepting the RSS feed can be fixed with a simple replacement of "&" with "and," at least according to the errors given.

The last validator above gave the following error message for the Ancient & Lost Civilizations feed:

[CaRP] XML error: XML_ERR_NAME_REQUIRED at line 1 -

But it gave no error for the Breaking Alternative News feed. You can try it yourself.



Also worth noting is that Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, the same people who make Firefox. My Firefox browser also will not load the latest threads when I click on the RSS feed to save it in my browser. So Firefox is a pretty major browser and it's apparently not loading any RSS feed with a "&" symbol in its title, just like three of the four validation websites I tried.


So as far as I can figure, that's your problem, and I even gave you a solution for it.

Do I get to come work for you guys now or what? Can I at least get a working ancient civs feed on Thunderbird/Mozilla?

So I found the problem with you guys' RSS feed, all you have to do is tell the guy who has access to that stuff that if he removes the "&" sign from RSS titles then all of your RSS feeds will be compatible with Mozilla software (Firefox and Thunderbird) and 3 out of 4 of the testing services above.

I would do it myself but I'm either not allowed or unable.

And once again see the test services I posted above, they give the same messages. 75% of them say that your RSS feeds with a "&" in the title are not valid RSS feeds. This is exactly what Mozilla software also says, and I'm sure I'm not the only ATS member using Mozilla software.

So has anyone looked at these RSS titles yet, to remove that "&" character that is causing the problem?