RSS feed broken for the rest of the world, only loading for blog admin

  • Resolved Sabinooo

    (@sabinooo)


    7 years, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    It’s been a dozen days I have this weird issue, on a blog whose URL I cannot share in public, I apologize: the RSS feed (blogurl/feed/) is broken to the world, but not to the blog admin.

    For RSS validators, I get the error message that “Not a gzipped file (Server response declares Content-Encoding: gzip; misconfigured server?)”
    For the rest of the world in web browsers, it’s an unreadable URL, for instance Chrome responds “ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED” and tells it’s an unreachable location.
    For me, if it’s a web browser that remembers I am logged in as blog admin (Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, doesn’t matter), I can successfully load the /feed/ url and it works flawlessly.

    I’m at my wit’s end.
    I can’t find any particular change I would have done a dozen days ago, perhaps the usual wordpress updates to existing component, perhaps a server (debian wheezy LAMP) update, there are always small updates from times to times.
    I ruled out cloudflare problems (still happens with caching off). I ruled out the only blog plugin that has an option related to RSS (Yoast SEO): no change when turned off. I changed the Admin>Settings>Reading options for RSS feeds, from summary to full text, saved, tried again: no change again.
    I have wp-supercache, and I made sure to entirely empty the cache and wait a minute between each new different attempt. But just for the hell of it, I also tried with supercached deactivated: no change either.
    I don’t know what else might be likely to interfere with the RSS feed of a blog.

    Please, would someone have an idea as to what may have caused that problem, and how it could be solved?

    Thank you VERY MUCH if you can help ??

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by Sabinooo.
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  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Have you tried:
    – Flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches. Not just your browser, but any op cache or content network cache as well such as Cloudflare. If you are using SiteLock, manage your caching there.
    – Flushing Managed host caches. Managed WP hosting often has special caches. If your host has a “Purge Varnish” or “Flush Memcache” tool, try that. You can ask your provider to flush memcache and Varnish for you if necessary.
    – deactivating ALL (not just one selective plugin but ALL) plugins temporarily to see if this resolves the problem (plugin functions can interfere). If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s).
    – switching to the unedited default Theme (Twenty Seventeen.) for a moment using the WP dashboard to rule out any theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by t-p.
    Thread Starter Sabinooo

    (@sabinooo)

    @t-p Thank you, however…. “Been there, done that”, is what I wanted to write… first!
    But I realized there was one plugin I didn’t deactivate because I kept on flushing it after every attempt and it looked enough to me: wp-supercache.

    And with that, I have found my culprit!

    If I deactivate wp-supercache, or if I turn off caching in wp-supercache, or if I add feed (is_feed) to the list of exclusions (and then flush the cache), the problem disappears.

    Finding *why* it happens is an entirely different issue that I’ll gladly skip, though. At least, now, the problem is solved, phiew ??

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