RSS feed

[NickFitz]

I believe I worked out what was going on with this. The CloudFlare protections had to be tightened up (the "prove you're not a robot" stuff) because the forum was being crippled by AI scraperbots that don't respect robots.txt. Unfortunately, while this worked to keep those bots out, an RSS reader is, in fact, a kind of bot! So people's RSS readers, including mine, were being shown the "prove you're not a robot" thing and couldn't because they are

Possibly related is that CUK moved to new ownership around that time, as you'll know if you read the newsletter. So when I wanted to let the powers-that-be know how it might be fixed (add a CloudFlare rule exempting the RSS feeds from the anti-robot protection), it turned out they were now the powers-that-weren't

Incidentally, this blocking also affected the main CUK site, which meant that the "CUK News" section in the forum sidebar has been out of date for a while, as that works by fetching the RSS feed for the main site every so often to update the headlines. Annoying, as I'd just fixed a different problem with that a few months ago

Anyway, I just noticed that the sidebar news has started updating again, suggesting the problem had been spotted and something done about it.

I went to check my RSS reader (NetNewsWire, if anybody with a Mac is looking for a good one) and it's able to subscribe to the forum and get recent posts again. So check your feeds and see if they've come back to life

[xoggoth]

Eh? I just see the contents of XML files

[ladymuck]

Actually no it didn't. latest thing in the list is 2022.

To be fair, not much has happened since then

[dcraggs]

Actually no it didn't. latest thing in the list is 2022.

[dcraggs]

https://forums.contractoruk.com/external?type=rss2 is the feed for the whole forum. If you look at the forum home page, you'll see a little orange RSS icon, which is a link to the feed for that forum, in the second column just before the "Topics" count. For example, the one for General (specifically) is https://forums.contractoruk.com/exte...rss2&nodeid=19

And on each subforum's home page, the same little orange icon/link appears near the forum's title, under the breadcrumb links and (at the moment) the yellow notice about the newsletter

Thanks, that worked.

[NickFitz]

That said, I find that although I can visit those URLs and see the feed in the browser, my feed reader can't access them. I suspect the CloudFront anti-robot league are responsible. I'll ask the powers that be if there's some way of opening those URLs up while still keeping the AI scraperbots (who are the root of all evil and the reason CloudFront has to be so fussy these days) at bay

[NickFitz]

https://forums.contractoruk.com/external?type=rss2 is the feed for the whole forum. If you look at the forum home page, you'll see a little orange RSS icon, which is a link to the feed for that forum, in the second column just before the "Topics" count. For example, the one for General (specifically) is https://forums.contractoruk.com/exte...rss2&nodeid=19

And on each subforum's home page, the same little orange icon/link appears near the forum's title, under the breadcrumb links and (at the moment) the yellow notice about the newsletter

[dcraggs]

I used to keep up with the website using feedly, but that has stopped working. Has the RSS feed gone?