RSS Feed Displays Incorrect Title and Excerpt

hi there. Have you done a theme/plugin conflict test to determine if there is something else that could be affecting your site and feed? Here’s a good article from the Yoast team on how to perform one these on your site to check for troublesome conflicts: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-check-for-plugin-conflicts/

Let us know how that goes.

Hi Chris,

I did as you mentioned and I am still having the same issue. I had all plugins disabled barr the podcast plugin and the same problems stands. I am still in Troubleshooting mode at the moment and as you can see – no change: https://www.theungracefulguide.com/feed/podcast/

All episodes display the incorrect title and content but the correct audio file. As before, whatever I now publish on my site, the RSS feed updates to the most recent blog published i.e the title and content. It also means that I cannot publish any content as the RSS feed issued to all podcast listening platforms such as iTunes and Podbean etc. are sending a notice to our subscribers to let them know a new podcast has been updated.

This is not ideal as now if we publish a post, we are spamming our podcast subscribers and also means we cannot publish a blog post which is a huge issue for our brand and business.

Can you please urgently advise how to correct this? Do we need to completely uninstall the plugin and start from scratch?! Hopefully not as this is not ideal.

Appreciate your time and assistance!

I have the exact issue. Following to see if any updates. My last four episodes have duplicate info but the audio file is different (and correct).

Update…I added a new post to my main blog and it changed those last four episodes all to that title and info in the RSS file output.

Hi all, thank you for bringing this to our attention. A few questions to help us zero in on a cause here:

– Are you publishing these podcast episodes as regular Posts, Podcast posts, or another Custom Post type?
– Do you have “Include Podcast post in main blog” selected in the Podcast -> Settings -> General area?
– Have you tried doing a Theme conflict test to see if another theme behaves like this as well? What theme are you using either way.
– Are you using Gutenberg?
– Are you creating the new posts by copying an existing post or creating them from scratch?

We’ve not been able to replicate this problem thus far in our staging/testing environments, so if there is any other information you can provide about how you’re creating your podcast episode posts that would be really helpful.

– Are you publishing these podcast episodes as regular Posts, Podcast posts, or another Custom Post type?

Creating a podcast post then creating a regular post with much of the same info but different title.

– Do you have “Include Podcast post in main blog” selected in the Podcast -> Settings -> General area?

No.

– Have you tried doing a Theme conflict test to see if another theme behaves like this as well? What theme are you using either way.

Using 2017 Theme. Ran health check and all checks out ok.

– Are you using Gutenberg?

Yes.

– Are you creating the new posts by copying an existing post or creating them from scratch?

Copying.

Hope this helps! Thanks! – Ben

Hi Ben, if you create a new post from scratch are you seeing this behavior still then? Instead of Copying an existing post?

I’m actually creating a new post but just copying the code text into the new post. It’s happened both ways though – copying from podcast post type to regular post and vice versa.

I will say for a week or so I was trying not to duplicate post types by checking the option to include podcast post type in main blog. That’s when it started getting funky so I thought it must just be the way the Theme implements so I decided to go back to the way it was working (so well). But it has kept up the strange behavior.

Maybe I’ll try disabling Gutenburg and creating a post with the classic editor?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Ben Ward.

That was it! When I disabled Gutenburg and created a podcast post with the classic editor the RSS file is fine.

Ok, that’s good to know, but even with Gutenberg enabled I’m not able to replicate this on our test sites. Either Posts or Podcast post types.

Would it be ok to follow up with you on our on-site chat to see about getting access to your site so we can debug this further to determine a root cause?

Absolutely! I’ll be available in just a little while.

Hi Guys,

Ben, delighted to hear the issue has been resolved for you – hopefully I can come to the same conclusion.

Chris – to answer the above questions:

– Are you publishing these podcast episodes as regular Posts, Podcast posts, or another Custom Post type?
I am creating the podcast as a Podcast post via the plugin page, add each podcast episode to a Podcast series via category.
I have a separate Podcast post page which I have a playlist shortcode embedded. This lists all our podcast episodes.
I also use the episode shortcode on each of my episode’s pages as our default podcast page doesn’t display them correctly (this has always been the case and has never been an issue before – we simply do not publicise this page)

– Do you have “Include Podcast post in main blog” selected in the Podcast -> Settings -> General area?
No
– Have you tried doing a Theme conflict test to see if another theme behaves like this as well? What theme are you using either way.
Yes – I have disabled all plugins and the theme via your troubleshoot link/instructions you sent originally in this thread. This did not fix the issue.

– Are you using Gutenberg?
No

– Are you creating the new posts by copying an existing post or creating them from scratch?
I do not fully understand what you mean here but if it what I think, then no, the only thing we copy and paste are the podcast tags. We create all our episodes and posts from scratch

We’ve not been able to replicate this problem thus far in our staging/testing environments, so if there is any other information you can provide about how you’re creating your podcast episode posts that would be really helpful.

All I know is that the issue seems to be the RSS feed itself. The audio is fine, the singular page episodes are all fine with correct title and content, but it is the RSS feed which has been delivering the incorrect info to podcast platforms, some podcast platforms (such as podbean) mow return an error message when I try to click into it.
As per Ben’s post above, I always use the classic editor on our blog posts.

If I can send you logins to our site, I would really appreciate you accessing our site and seeing if you can resolve this issue, please?

I think I have solved my mystery…I was putting the shortcode for the player into the details for the podcast post. I can put anything else in the post type and it seems to render to the RSS file fine (so far!). If that’s all it was that’s great news though it might be good for others to know not to display player that way…just to have it displayed per the settings.

BEEEEN!

Thank you SO much, your suggestion worked perfectly! We removed the episode shortcode form the posts and the RSS feed fixed itself automatically.

Thanks a million for your help with this!

Just to confirm, when you place the [ss_player] shortcode into a Podcast post type post it creates the issue with the episode post titles being wrong in your feed?