GWJ podcast not downloading automatically last few weeks...

Hi GWJ Crew, listener and fan of the podcast for 8 months now, its a core part of my daily 1+hour commute to work. Love the show!

I use Apple's Podcasts app to listen and have it set up to automatically download new episodes and to refresh in the background every 6 hours. These have always been my settings, and never had a problem until recently, in the last two weeks.

While my other podcasts are refreshing fine, I have had to manually download the new episodes from the show podcast for today's episode and last week's.

Is this an Apple problem, [READ: anybody else experiencing this?] , or was their some issue publishing the podcast these last two weeks? I dunno. Help appreciated!

I saw a number of issues with RSS over the past couple of weeks due to the site redesign. Double check the settings of the GWJCC podcast and make sure you don't have an empty GWJ non-CC podcast in there. Today's was also a little later than usual.

I also use Apple Podcasts, and it also hasn't been downloading automatically. The episodes do show up in the feed, so I can download manually. Today I flicked the switch from subscribe to unsubscribe and back, and I'll see if it helps next week.

I had to delete the RSS feed from my music server and resubscribe. That did the trick for me.

I had a brief hiccup with Downcast where it started downloading every episode in the feed. Seems fine now.

Adding the feed to iTunes manually, I get the episodes coming in as expected. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to test that with a setup that was previously subscribed before the new site design launch.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I had a brief hiccup with Downcast where it started downloading every episode in the feed. Seems fine now.

This was expected. The way the feed was handled on the old site, the GUID for each podcast episode was a mess. Fixing that mess meant that GUIDs changed, so podcast clients would have thought (just that first time) that they had a bunch of new episodes to download. This shouldn't happen again.

I would like to bump this, because I am also facing the exact same issue as the OP.

Maybe some additional info I can add.
I attempted to fix this, by removing and readding the podcast.
However, the moment I press "subscribe" I get this error message, which translates to:

Subscribing impossible.
The provided link is not a valid podcast.

Unfortunately the "provided link" is of course hidden, so I cannot try to access it otherwise.
But the problem also seems to manifest on the iTunes desktop app.

@doogiemac: Don't want to sidetrack you, but just a shot in the dark: is the podcast descriptor also hosted with the help of cloudflare? Maybe the cloudflare captcha topic is also blocking the request for the podcast descriptor?

Grimmi

Grimmi Meloni wrote:

I would like to bump this, because I am also facing the exact same issue as the OP.

Hmm... so it looks like you're in Germany, yes? We were getting completely slammed from some IPs in Germany a few weeks ago, so I had CloudFlare challenge German visitors. I'm guessing that resulted in this issue. In the hopes that behavior has stopped, I'll remove the challenge and we'll see what happens.

I can confirm that both issues

  • frequent captcha checks in the browser
  • unable to (re)subscribe to the podcast / podcast not updating

are now gone.

Thanks for taking care of this Doogiemac.

Awesome!