LissaKay

I am so glad I could provide some measure of entertainment to ya'll support folks. I know we always loved to bash on the difficult clients ... but you know what? Those obnoxious clients usually got what they needed in the end, and usually because they yelled loud and long enough to keep someone plugging away at the issue until it was resolved.

Trust me, I have been on both sides of the support desk, I know what works.

I was patient and understanding for a very, very long time. The Google techs bore the brunt of my wrath, and that is solely because they attempted to blow me off from the very start. It was only with a lot of foot stomping and yelling that I was able to get any information out of them. They were willing to let it go with the pronouncement that "Something on your server is keeping our Feedfetcher from downloading your feeds, contact them." I wouldn't let it go at that, no way.

I passed along the info to Surpass as I got it. It was frustrating from the start because all the responses I got seemed to totally ignore what I was telling them. But I remained patient, and kept sending the same info, over and over. Quiet, yet firm in not letting the issue go. I even praised them for sticking with it for so long.

Until today, when they pulled this BS with the htaccess file. I felt totally insulted and blown off. I have checked with several sources, and all of them concur that there is nothing in my htaccess file that could be sending incorrect Http response codes to Google. So, yeah ... to expect me to believe that horse-pucky is pretty darn idiotic.

My butt is gonna get cancer from all this smoke being blown up it ... I expected that from Google, but not from Surpass.

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LissaKay.com is on SH130

H

Probably going get bitched at for saying this, but I'll give it a shot.

LissaKay, could it possibly be that Surpass doesn't have a damn clue what's causing it? This certainly isn't normal and the obvious issues have all be explored, with nothing coming up. Simply put, this problem is beyond what support normally deals with. What's causing it appears to be unknown and likely a minor misconfiguration or bug somewhere within many levels of server software and applications.

Not only that, but there's four parties involved.

Surpass (the host)
You (the site owner)
Expression Engine (the software)
FeedFetcher (the third party)

At this point in time each party has said it's not their fault and laid blame on another party. In the case of you, you've initiated the blame and put it towards all three.

Here's what the problem is:

Google's FeedFetcher is not updating your feed from Expression Engine, that you installed and configured (I'm assuming this as you haven't stated otherwise), hosted on a Surpass server.

Here's what we know:

Your feed works absolutely fine in most (all?) other FeedFetcher equivalents of other companies/sites.
Other sites on the server of the same software also experience this problem.

I hate to say it, but I still don't believe 100% that this is in the fault of Surpass. This just screams a software issue to me. I know you said you never touched the RSS template, but I thought I read that template is provided by the theme author? Could it be possible that's messed up?

I notice your thread over at Google you posted to them "Just fix the damn thing!". That was yesterday. Apparently you still don't know who blame. Should that not be a sign of the complexity of the issue?

And just for shits and giggles, have you considered putting your feed through FeedBurner so that they can deal with all these issues? I know people that have had various issues in the past that switched to FeedBurner and had them resolved quite quickly. If you go that route, all you'd have to do is add some quick mod_rewrite to .htaccess to automatically redirect to the FeedBurner URL.

LissaKay

Yup. And I would be happy with that answer. Just not some lame excuse.

No. Edwin runs the same software, and has no problems with his feeds, and until I was moved last week, we were on the same server.

Again, no. The feed template is the default that comes with ExpressionEngine. I did some very minor edits to it, but it worked just fine for a long time, then stopped without anything being changed, at least under my control.

Again, two things were happening when my feeds (both RSS and Atom on my main site) stopped updating ... Google made some changes to GReader, and Surpass support was trying to resolved some other issues with my account and ImageMagick - which led to other issues with server error 500 and phpsuexec. That is what I kept repeating to support, hoping they would grab onto that and figure out what was changed that might have caused the issue.

Yes, I continue to bang on Google. They still will only give half the information about the issue ... that Feedfetcher is getting incorrect Http response code. Not WHY that could be happening. That and they are just rude, and tried many times to just blow me off.

But, my main suspicion remains with the changes made during the previous issues on the server. I stayed up all night last night tearing my entire site down and reloading all the files that could possibly have an effect on the functioning of the site, checking to make sure the permissions were correct for being on a server with Phpsuexec. I dropped my SQL tables and restored them from a back-up, downgraded and re-upgraded my install of ExpressionEngine, deleted several old SQL databases that I don't need and many directories of software I no longer use or need. At the same time, I again asked support to make sure there were no custom settings on my account, that it was all set to defaults. All at the same time, they disabled the main htaccess file, something changed and it seems to be working now. To them, it appears that it was the htaccess file. Fine, if that is what makes them happy ... even they cannot explain it, saying it should not be so.

Oy vey.

Now I just need my .htaccess back ... these referrer and comment spammers are a pain!

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LissaKay.com is on SH130