WebmasterWorld RSS Feeds Broken

The "active" feed has been broken for a month

[randallxski]

I haven't gotten the WebmasterWorld RSS feeds to work recently. The active.rss feed has not successfully updated in a month (error is "Server returned HTTP Error 404: Not Found"). The index.rss feed will not validate. See [feedvalidator.org...]
The errors are:

Sorry
This feed does not validate.
* Feeds should not be served with the "text/plain" media type [help]
* Your feed appears to be encoded as "UTF-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]
* line 55, column 108: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x93 in position 2671: unexpected code byte (maybe a high-bit character?) [help]

Is the RSS reader too strict? I use SharpReader. Failed feeds point me towards feedvalidator.org.

Any suggestions?

[eurotrash]

The last post about this was passed over to the community center.

This is a problem for someone to fix at the system level.

[Dreamquick]

'ze recent posts RSS is toast, as per [webmasterworld.com...] which is why you're getting a 404.

- Tony

[randallxski]

So what's up with the index.rss invalide feed? Is that one supposed to be killed as well?

[Dreamquick]

The feed validator *tells* you exactly what's up with the other feed - those characters flagged as "?" aren't valid plaintext (ASCII) characters. Since the feed claims to contain just ASCII characters this would cause it not to fail validation.

As to why it's happening?

Well at a guess it'll either be that the encoding on the feed is outdated or that the content isn't being filtered correctly before it's used by the feed.

A question about an error in the RSS feed [webmasterworld.com] was raised a week or so ago but didn't appear to get anywhere; it might be worth your while sending Brett a sticky-mail with an example of a problem feed and explaining which application or service it's not working on because it sounds like he doesn't experience the problem himself.

- Tony

[randallxski]

The feed validator tells me what's wrong with the feed, but not about it's future and whether it might be corrected and updated. It has potential to join the "active" feed on the "discontinued" list, and that's where you all come in. I thought (obviously incorrectly so far) that someone might have details about the potential demise of these feeds...whether they are difficult to maintain and just not worth the trouble or whether they are updated and I'm somehow using outdated software.

Thanks for the lead on the other thread and who might actually care to hear about a broken feed. I hadn't seen that thread since it wasn't in the RSS forum.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, it isn't perfect - none of the major rss readers ever have a problem with it. There are a couple of character issues that pop up from time to time (bound to happen in this environment without an army of character translators), but I've not taken the 1k hours it would take to address it.