My RSS Feed looks damaged – how do i repair it?

I think there is a conflicting plugin but which?

To find out Try:
-deactivating ALL plugins temporarily to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try deactivating via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. If applicible, also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old.
– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems (because the hooks remain unless plugins completely removed or some plugins stick around in cached files. So by renaming the folder, you break them and force them inactive).
If the abo step don’t help, to rule out any theme-specific issue, try switching to the unedited default theme for a moment using the WP dashboard. If you don’t have access to your admin area, you can switch to the default theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. Alternately, you can remove other themes except the default theme. That will force your site to use it.

I tried removing syntax highlighter plugin, which changed the error message as ” Error at line 36″ to “error at line 17”.

Then, I tried deactivating all plugins and reactivating them again, which made the RSS work smoothly, but sometime later, the error message appeared again.

Can anyone help me here?

Then, I tried deactivating all plugins and reactivating them again, which made the RSS work smoothly, but sometime later, the error message appeared again.

That sounds like one of your plugins is causing the problems – so you’ll need to figure out which one(s) by process of elimination…

Check if you’re running DEBUG mode in production. I was just able to reproduce the feed error with the Syntax Highligher plugin and DEBUG mode set to true. What’s happening is that the plugin is causing warnings to appear, and they appear at the top of every page (including feeds) due to running in DEBUG mode.

In wp-config.php, make sure you have:

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

not

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

That said, I don’t think that’s the only problem (but give it a shot). If you do find a specific plugin causing this issue, please post what you find here.

Scriptrunner, It is already set to false.

To find the faulty plugin, should stop all my plugins? I am afraid, because that could jeopardize my traffic…

Every time someone’s RSS feed breaks, it’s always because of additional content added to the feed. In the cases that I have been able to track it down, it was always because of a plugin.

I see this at the top of your feed:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-27424618-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'knolzone.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'https://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

<!-- Woo Tabs Widget -->
<script type="text/javascript">jQuery(document).ready(function(){var a="#tagcloud";var b=jQuery("#tagcloud").height();jQuery(".inside ul li:last-child").css("border-bottom","0px");jQuery(".wooTabs").each(function(){jQuery(this).children("li").children("a:first").addClass("selected")});jQuery(".inside > *").hide();jQuery(".inside > *:first-child").show();jQuery(".wooTabs li a").click(function(a){var b=jQuery(this).attr("href");jQuery(this).parent().parent().children("li").children("a").removeClass("selected");jQuery(this).addClass("selected");jQuery(this).parent().parent().parent().children(".inside").children("*").hide();jQuery(".inside "+b).fadeIn(500);a.preventDefault()})})</script>

<!--wp_footer-->

so something is adding footer html to your feed xml.

You’ve already indicated the disabling all plugins fixes this, and as I said, I’ve always found the cause to be plugin. (though in theory, it could be a theme – you might try switching to default theme like TwentyThirteen to see if anything changes)

I’d really like to be able to duplicate this. Could you post a list of all the plugins you are using?

Scriptrunner, it’s great to see your enthusiasm for this problem, but I haven’t been able to fix it as yet.

for you, here’s the list of Plugins I use :

1.AA’s Digg Digg Alternative
2.AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
3.Akismet
4.AVH Extended Categories Widgets
5.BackUpWordPress
6.BWP Google XML Sitemaps
7.Category Widgets
8.CloudFlare
9.Disqus Comment System
10.Google+ Badge Widget
11.Google XML Sitemaps
12.Latest twitter sidebar widget
13.NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati
14.Syntax Highlighter ComPress – Deactivated
15.W3 Total Cache
16.WooDojo
17.WordPress Importer
18.WordPress Related Posts
19.WordPress SEO
20.WP-Table Reloaded
21.WP Category Post List Widget
22.WP Facebook Open Graph protocol
23.WP Google Fonts
24.WP Social Statistics

I am playing trial and error with each one of these…..and yet i haven’t been able to weed out that problematic plugin

As I suggested in my first reply, have you tried:

-deactivating ALL plugins temporarily to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try deactivating via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. If applicible, also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old.
– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems (because the hooks remain unless plugins completely removed or some plugins stick around in cached files. So by renaming the folder, you break them and force them inactive).

The night, about 3 days ago,
I deactivated all plugins – RSS feeds worked fine

I reactivated one by one, by simultaneously checking if RSS was working….. – It worked.

In the morning : The feed showed the same error again.

How do i even check if the feed plays truant in this way?

– To rule out any theme-specific issue, try switching to the unedited default theme for a moment using the WP dashboard. If you don’t have access to your admin area, you can switch to the default theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. Alternately, you can remove other themes except the default theme. That will force your site to use it.

I was able to duplicate it, and the plugin causing the problem in my case is:

WP Facebook Open Graph protocol

FYI – WordPress caches feeds for 1 hour, so you may need to update a post to have it refresh your feed.

Later today I’m going to dig through the plugin and see why it’s causing the issue.

Let me know if deactivating that plugin does or does not fix your feed.

If you’re interested, I’ve posted the fix on the plugin author’s support forum:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/footer-html-added-to-feed-with-207

The author also has a dev version of the plugin on Github, and I had no issues with the feed using that version.