Posts from RSS bumped on each run

Bug
1

We upgraded our instance from 2.1.0.beta5 to 2.1.0.beta5~git84.b12cf08c57 today to get the XSS fix.

And it seems since that upgrade it bumps all RSS posts without replies on each and every run of the job.

As you can see here https://discuss.pixls.us/c/pixls-us

The obvious candidates from the git log between the 2 commits are 932195d828aeb41e24a1eba64e73b55565776b10 or baf413d527d1e1fc7f8e04f357d2f58f14220a8e by @tgxworld or @xrav3nz respectively

Or am I missing another change that could explain this behavior?

2

Taking a look right now. The posts seem to be bumped by edits but diffs are empty for some reasons…

2 Likes
3

yeah it only seems to affect posts with no replies. posts with replies
seems to be fine.

4

Yes, this is because edits to the first post will only bump topics without any replies.

After making sure this didn’t happen on my private instance, nor did the a new spec fail:

I took a look into the RSS feed https://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml, and found all of the titles have an additional space at the beginning and the end.

<title>
  <![CDATA[ LGM and Libre Graphics at SCaLE 16x ]]>
           ^                                   ^
      the space here                        and here
</title>

This tricks the code into thinking the title have been changed, and tries to update the post. However, the extra spaces in titles are stripped when saving, resulting in an “empty” edit. The loop continues …

I think we can either

  1. drop support for title updates through RSS feeds
  2. patch TopicEmbed or PostRevisor to omit such edits

I’m leaning towards 1, because it is niche enough and we never had this feature before anyway, and 2 requires a lot of careful changes.

Could you @darix try to drop the spaces in the feed, or “suppress the category from Latest” in the meantime?

3 Likes
5

I also vote for (1) it is one less risky feature to support.

1 Like
6

Forgot to link back here.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/6324

The PR’s been merged, and already in test-passed! Let me know if you still experience the problem after updating.

6 Likes
7

Updated to v2.1.0.beta5+92 - and we are monitoring the issue.

1 Like
8

So far it looks good. no bumps since the update.

1 Like
9

Just in case you wonder … the bump we see now … is caused by @Patrick_David not just fixing extra whitespaces in the title but also in the actual content of the RSS feed :slight_smile:

1 Like
10

I never claimed to be a smart man, and assuming this can lead to precarious situations.

Nevertheless, I fixed the odd whitespace in feed.xml while I was there. Sorry for screwing up the test case! :smiley:

2 Likes
11

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