Added extra in Mailchimp RSS

Hi @martinedens let me take a look, can you send me the URL of your RSS feed?

Sure, thanks it’s https://www.mkse.com/feed

Hi @martinedens I don’t think our plugin is adding the title and alt text to the feed, and there’s an extra / in the IMG as well. I would try deactivating other plugins, a few at a time, and check the raw feed after each time, to see if it goes away. Once it does, reactivate those plugins one at a time, checking the feed each time, and see which one causes it to be added back.

The other more advanced method is to use SSH (you’ll need be familiar with SSH and have SSH access), and use the grep command to find code relating to the RSS feed, ‘the_excerpt_rss’ is one good way:

cd wp-content/plugins/
grep -r 'the_excerpt_rss' *

For my site as an example, it displays:

# grep -r 'the_excerpt_rss' *
featured-images-for-rss-feeds/featured_images_in_rss.php:            'the_excerpt_rss',
featured-images-for-rss-feeds-premium/includes/premium/premium.php:add_filter( 'the_excerpt_rss', 'firss_insert_ads', 15 );
featured-images-for-rss-feeds-premium/includes/premium/premium.php:add_filter( 'the_excerpt_rss', 'firss_featured_images_in_rss_first_image', 1001, 1 );
featured-images-for-rss-feeds-premium/featured_images_in_rss.php:            'the_excerpt_rss',
feedzy-rss-feeds/includes/feedzy-rss-feeds-feed-tweaks.php:add_filter( 'the_excerpt_rss', 'feedzy_insert_thumbnail' );
wordpress-seo/src/integrations/front-end/rss-footer-embed.php:		\add_filter( 'the_excerpt_rss', [ $this, 'embed_rssfooter_excerpt' ] );
wp-piwik/classes/WP_Piwik.php:				add_filter ( 'the_excerpt_rss', array (

From that result, I see that plugins with these folder names have code affecting the RSS feed:

featured-images-for-rss-feeds
featured-images-for-rss-feeds-premium
feedzy-rss-feeds
wordpress-seo
wp-piwik

And I can narrow down which one is causing issues or conflicting with other plugins.

Let me know if you need help finding the plugn? It may also be your theme, or a plugin that adds title tags to all images, and is affecting the feed as well.

Wow. This is among the most thorough and precise answers I’ve ever received in an support forum. Thank you very much.
Yes, I’m not sure I should SSH and edit too much in the XML since the error is minor and just appeared. It might be fixed by just an upcoming, another plugin update. I use Rank math for SEO which also just was updated. I’ll give it a few weeks to see what happens first.

Hi @martinedens no worries, happy to help. Just to clarify, the SSH commands just help find the plugins to target for deactivation, there’s no editing going on. It’s just easier/quicker (in a sense, if you are familiar with SSH) than deactivating plugins one at a time.

If you’d like help finding the plugin, if you’re a premium user or even on the free trial of premium, you can use the contact form to submit a tech support request, and it includes a form to securely send admin login info to us. I can then try and nail this down for you more. I’d like to figure it out so Mailchimp is fixed.

Hi @martinedens We’ve had a 2nd report of the extra title tag… can you submit a bug report using our plugin’s Contact form? I’d like to figure out what’s causing this for you and for others it may be happening to.

Yes, I solved it yesterday simply turning off all Rank Math Image SEO options. That helped. Might work just turning off Image SEO title support, but since the RSS-connection to Mailchimp lags a bit when testing I havn’t had time to try both.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by martinedens.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by martinedens.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by martinedens.

@martinedens Ah perfect, I will use that info going forward, Rank Math SEO is injecting image titles, and it is being picked up in the feed as well.

It’s also doing it in a non-standard way, the IMG tag ends in /> and it injects it right before > so ends up being / title=”xyz”> which breaks the IMG tag itself in most cases, as seen here.

Hi, there just was an update to Rank Math but it didn’t adress this. So, the only way as of now is to turn off all Images SEO support such as “Add missing ALT attributes” and “Add missing TITLE attributes” to avoid the tags breaking.

Thanks for your reply @martinedens!

I will look into this more and see if it’s something that Rank Math is doing on their end wrong that should be addressed, and perhaps if it’s something our plugin can help adjust/fix when it sees it.

Also @martinedens I would highly recommend that you open a ticket with Rank Math here regarding image titles affecting your RSS feed and breaking validation:

https://support.rankmath.com/product/rank-math-suite/