Broken RSS feeds?

Hi Ranchers!

I tried to create a new OPML file to import into my news reader in order to update everything with the new forum links. I wrote a little Java tool to create this OPML file for all new feeds from the JavaRanch and unfortunately I noticed that some (I guess 3) RSS feeds seem to be broken because they don't contain well-formed XML.

I was able to reproduce this error for the "Struts" and "Book review" forums when trying to add them manually to my news reader (Agregator from KDE). I downloaded the said two XML feeds and noticed that both have a fragment of any HTML table appended to the regular XML for the RSS feeds.

I guess this could be a bug in the software generating the feeds. I'm just wondering why nobody else experienced this problem yet or at least I couldn't find any other complaints here :-) Can someone confirm (or even better repair) this problem? Thanks!

Marco

Yes, the RSS generating code definitely has some problems. I fixed the Book Reviews and Struts feeds for the moment, but this may be a recurring problem that requires a different approach to generating the XML (in other words: it could take a while).

Thanks a lot Ulf!

Both feeds - "Struts" and "Book Reviews" - produce correct XML output now! From my perspective "Blatant Advertising" seems to be the only feed making trouble right now ;-) I don't know if the code generating these feeds is a problem in general or if it's sufficient to correct this single issue. Perhaps someone feels like fixing the bug...

Marco

Fixed that one too. Some of the problems stem from the way we migrated topics, so once those older topics fall out of the feeds, that will reduce the number of problems. But it's possible to post stuff that will screw up RSS, so that's a TODO item.

OK, I see your problem. I think it's not a big deal to find some small bugs after migrating all the data from the old forum. I just wanted to inform the Ranch Office ;-)

Anyway thanks a lot again! Every feed works fine now...

Marco

Hi!

Unfortunately it's me again

It seems like there are still problems with the RSS feeds every now and then. I guess some feeds are broken for the same reasons as the last time I posted here. Of course this is not a very critical bug in the new forum software and I know you have to do lots of other things to keep everything working. Anyway I'd be glad to help you solve these problems. If there's anything I can do about it just let me know!

Marco

Which ones are broken? Clicking through a list of 60 feeds to find one isn't much fun...

Sorry, my post wasn't meant as a request to fix the problem immediately!

The broken feeds vary from time to time but looking in my newsreader tells me that there's currently a problem with the Struts forum. Unfortunately the newsreader doesn't tell me what's exactly the problem but using a XML validator points out that there's an additional at the very end of the feed which doesn't make any sense here.

Marco

Sorry, my post wasn't meant as a request to fix the problem immediately!

I know. And I promise that I won't :-) But it's good to have an example of the problem before it drops off the feed or gets edited away; I had forgotten the details.

The issue is unbalanced HTML tags. In this case there was an opening "<a href=...>" link, and the HTML-Prettifier felt it was necessary to add the closing "</a>" tag. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that within the offending post, but at the end of the document, so that it breaks it :-(

The handling of HTML in JForum is tricky -and buggy-, and something I don't fully understand. Handling embedded HTML in XML makes it even harder. So I'm not even sure at which level to attack this problem :-(