RSS feed discovery tags not discoverable?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

zoul reports that the RSS feeds on their Discourse instance are not discoverable, as the link tags are not visible when using curl. However, the tags are present in the page source. Jagster mentions that many RSS readers require the exact URL of the feed, but zoul notes that their reader, Reeder, can discover feeds from the main site URL. A comparison with meta.discourse.org, which does return the link tags with curl, reveals that the issue might be related to the use of a sub-domain, as Jagster observes that it works for their forum, which does use a sub-domain.

1

We got a report that the RSS feeds on our Discourse instance were not discoverable, ie. an RSS reader fails to add them simply by entering our main Discourse website URL. I took a look at the page source and the link tags are there:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest posts" href="https://diskutuj.digital/posts.rss"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest topics" href="https://diskutuj.digital/latest.rss"/>

But they are not visible from curl:

% curl -sL https://diskutuj.digital | grep "rss"
%

This could explain why the feed was not picked up by the reader. Does my curl test make sense? Is it possible that the link tags are somehow not present in the HTML returned by the server?

2

I don’t know and that’s why I’m totally off topic, I reckon, but I use Newsify on iPad and AFAIK it wants exact url to RSS-feed. I can’t even remember when I saw RSS-reader that could discover feeds out of main url.

I know. That really doesn’t prove anything.

3

I use Reeder and I’m sure it can discover feeds from main site URL.

But this works:

% curl -sL https://meta.discourse.org | grep "rss+xml"
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest posts" href="https://meta.discourse.org/posts.rss" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest topics" href="https://meta.discourse.org/latest.rss" />

So how can be our (fully up-to-date) site different from Discourse Meta?

4

And it works for my forum. And only difference based on curls is your aren’t using sub-domain. How that could be important I don’t know.