RSS feeds plugin: perennially "new" topic, from very old item in a feed

I have the polling plugin following this RSS feed, https://feeds.captivate.fm/podcast-pontifications/

The plugin creates topics in this category, News - Podcaster Community

…but you won’t see anything there unless you are logged into our Discourse instance.

That “Season Three Starts Now!” topic is always at the top. It seems every time the polling plugin checks this feed, it updates this topic.

The corresponding RSS item (as best I can tell, by searching for that title in the RSS) is about 20,000 lines [that’s not a typo] into the RSS feed.

Here’s the ITEM…

RSS item in here…
<item><title>Season Three Starts Now!</title><itunes:title>Season Three Starts Now!</itunes:title><description>What can you expect from Season Three of Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra? The format is strikingly familiar to Seasons One and Two. Each episode is a short-form, deep-dive into a single topic of importance to every working podcaster. These are future-forward topics that help make podcasting better. But for this season, I get a little more philosophical and high-minded. A bit more intellectual, without being pretentious. At least I hope.
Where other PAPS, that’s podcasts about podcasting tell you want to do, Podcast Pontifications are good things for you to think about. Subscribe today so you don’t miss the daily episode I provide every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.


Mentioned in this episode:
Support For Abortion Rights
While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Abortion is a basic healthcare need for the millions of people who can become pregnant. Everyone should have the freedom to decide what’s best for themselves and their families, including when it comes to ending a pregnancy. This decision has dire consequences for individual health and safety, and could have harsh repercussions for other landmark decisions.

Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health and independence of all Americans. Even if you live in a state where abortion rights are upheld, access to safe medical procedures shouldn’t be determined by location, and it shouldn&apos;t be the privilege of a small few.

You can help by donating to local abortion funds. To find out where to donate for each state, visit donations4abortion.com. 

If you or someone you know needs help, or if you want to get more involved, here are 5 resources:
 
1. ShoutYourAbortion.com is a campaign to normalize abortion. 
2. DontBanEquality.com is a campaign for companies to take a stand against abortion restrictions. 
3. Abortion.cafe has information about where to find clinics. 
4. PlanCPills.org provides early at-home abortion pills that you can keep in your medicine cabinet. 
5. Choice.CRD.co has a collection of these resources and more. 

We encourage you to speak up! And spread the word.


This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: 

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy</description><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>What can you expect from Season Three of Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra? The format is strikingly familiar to Seasons One and Two. Each episode is a short-form, deep-dive into a single topic of importance to every working podcaster. These are future-forward topics that help make podcasting better. But for this season, I get a little more philosophical and high-minded. A bit more intellectual, without being pretentious. At least I hope.</p><p>Where other PAPS, that’s podcasts about podcasting tell you want to do, Podcast Pontifications are good things for you to think about. Subscribe today so you don’t miss the daily episode I provide every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.</p><p><br></p><p>Mentioned in this episode:</p><p><strong>Support For Abortion Rights</strong></p><p>While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Abortion is a basic healthcare need for the millions of people who can become pregnant. Everyone should have the freedom to decide what’s best for themselves and their families, including when it comes to ending a pregnancy. This decision has dire consequences for individual health and safety, and could have harsh repercussions for other landmark decisions.

Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health and independence of all Americans. Even if you live in a state where abortion rights are upheld, access to safe medical procedures shouldn’t be determined by location, and it shouldn't be the privilege of a small few.

You can help by donating to local abortion funds. To find out where to donate for each state, visit donations4abortion.com. 

If you or someone you know needs help, or if you want to get more involved, here are 5 resources:
 
1. ShoutYourAbortion.com is a campaign to normalize abortion. 
2. DontBanEquality.com is a campaign for companies to take a stand against abortion restrictions. 
3. Abortion.cafe has information about where to find clinics. 
4. PlanCPills.org provides early at-home abortion pills that you can keep in your medicine cabinet. 
5. Choice.CRD.co has a collection of these resources and more. 

We encourage you to speak up! And spread the word.</p><br/><br/>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: <br/><br/>Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy<br/>Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy]]></content:encoded><link><![CDATA[https://podcastpontifications.com]]></link><guid isPermaLink="false">4ab138fb-c878-43d0-9fb6-be2820aad3be</guid><itunes:image href="https://artwork.captivate.fm/6aed5a13-eb81-4fdc-aa30-46d57f9f1689/pjlc88lb1twez7okpd3ga69k.jpg"/><dc:creator><![CDATA[Evo Terra]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2020 09:55:00 -0700</pubDate><enclosure url="https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/11525/podcasts.captivate.fm/media/0c27a8f9-df59-440d-b77f-91a92843e38b/pps3-season-three-starts-now.mp3" length="4226244" type="audio/mpeg"/><itunes:duration>04:24</itunes:duration><itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit><itunes:episodeType>trailer</itunes:episodeType><itunes:season>3</itunes:season><itunes:summary>What can you expect from Season Three of Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra? The format is strikingly familiar to Seasons One and Two. Each episode is a short-form, deep-dive into a single topic of importance to every working podcaster. These are future-forward topics that help make podcasting better. But for this season, I get a little more philosophical and high-minded. A bit more intellectual, without being pretentious. At least I hope.
Where other PAPS, that’s podcasts about podcasting tell you want to do, Podcast Pontifications are good things for you to think about. Subscribe today so you don’t miss the daily episode I provide every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.


Mentioned in this episode:
Support For Abortion Rights
While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Abortion is a basic healthcare need for the millions of people who can become pregnant. Everyone should have the freedom to decide what’s best for themselves and their families, including when it comes to ending a pregnancy. This decision has dire consequences for individual health and safety, and could have harsh repercussions for other landmark decisions.

Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health and independence of all Americans. Even if you live in a state where abortion rights are upheld, access to safe medical procedures shouldn’t be determined by location, and it shouldn&apos;t be the privilege of a small few.

You can help by donating to local abortion funds. To find out where to donate for each state, visit donations4abortion.com. 

If you or someone you know needs help, or if you want to get more involved, here are 5 resources:
 
1. ShoutYourAbortion.com is a campaign to normalize abortion. 
2. DontBanEquality.com is a campaign for companies to take a stand against abortion restrictions. 
3. Abortion.cafe has information about where to find clinics. 
4. PlanCPills.org provides early at-home abortion pills that you can keep in your medicine cabinet. 
5. Choice.CRD.co has a collection of these resources and more. 

We encourage you to speak up! And spread the word.


This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: 

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy</itunes:summary><itunes:author>Evo Terra</itunes:author></item>```

The pubDate on this item is from ~2020. I don’t think the pubDate is changing. I suppose the Captivate platform (this is a podcast feed so who knows what they might do with ads in the feeds) could be changing something subtle… but then why does only this specific RSS item stay ever-fresh.

On the other hand: It’s quite impressive that polling this RSS feed works at all. :wink:

1 Like

Hi Craig,
I checked out the issue with this site and the topic is associated with https://podcastpontifications.com home page itself. As the homepage keeps changing, this topic keeps getting updated and hence, it keeps getting bumped. The topic has 737 edits at this point.

We have another topic from the same source which is associated with https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/making-complex-podcast-tech-disappear-with-alitu and it doesn’t have this issue.

So yes, its an issue with the source of the the RSS feed.

Do let us know what you think about all of this. I’ll discuss internally and let you know if there’s a simple fix to this issue.

2 Likes

Can you explain this in more detail?

I thought it was associated with a specific RSS Item (that particular one I sniffed out in my original post) in the feed.

1 Like

@craigconstantine
I’ve figured this out. Looking at https://feeds.captivate.fm/podcast-pontifications page, there are two feed items

  1. 3 Easy Steps To Increase The Global Appeal Of Your Local Podcast [S3E55B]
  2. Season Three Starts Now!

both having their href value as https://podcastpontifications.com and that’s the issue. You can verify this by clicking the both of those feeds’ links.

The rss polling plugin uses the TopicEmbed model which enforces uniqueness of the embed_url. Both of these entries having the same embed_url, it overrides one of the entries with other’s content depending on the sequence in which it fetches both of the entries and creates a new revision of the topic’s first post each times it polls the rss feed. If you click on the :pencil2: icon on the first post, you’ll see the content alternating between both of these feeds content

The best course of action would be to reach out to the person responsible for running the site and ask him to correct the url of both of these items.

3 Likes

Oh that explains it! Thanks for digging into it.

2 Likes