Closed Bug 1344513 Opened 7 years ago Closed 7 years ago

Some RSS Feeds only showing summary

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Product:
MailNews Core
Component:
Feed Reader
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: DavidDuxbury, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have been reading RSS feeds using Thunderbird for many years and recently only feed summaries have been showing for some feeds despite the summary option not being checked. The most recent feed to do this is 

http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/pcmag.xml

If I scroll down to older feeds the entire webpage is displayed.

I'm using Thunderbird version 45.7.1. I'm not sure if this is 45 branch or not.


Actual results:

Feed summary displayed


Expected results:

Full website page should have displayed.
Yes, 45.x is "45 branch". Moving this to the correct component.
Component: Untriaged → Feed Reader
Product: Thunderbird → MailNews Core
Version: 45 Branch → 45
All specific feed issues are 100% the result of publisher error or failure to follow spec, and invalid.

Fortunately, bugzilla has a feature to block unwanted emails from specific accounts.  Due to your failure to comprehend a no cc spam request, you are now on that list.
What does "Due to your failure to comprehend a no cc spam request, you are now on that list" mean? What is a no cc spam request? I have not sent any spam. I find your response very agressive. I was merely reporting what I thought was a bug. When I try to read the RSS feeds by any means other than Thunderbird I can read them without any problems.
Alta88 has un-CC'ed himself. He will not receive your e-mail. Sadly he is not our most friendly contributor.

I think his sentence "Due to your failure to comprehend a no cc spam request, you are now on that list." refers to me since I added CC'ed him on the message.
JorgK,

Thanks for explaining that. I had no idea what he meant.

DLD
I took a look at http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/pcmag.xml. Those posts only consist of one line, like
  The stylish, comfortable, on-ear Urbanears Plattan 2 headphones deliver bass and balance at an affordable price.

I have the same problem with the BBC feed at http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml. I get one line.

I also have a more useful feed from http://www.tagesschau.de/xml/rss2 which delivers nice pages. That I switched to summary mode, and the content is just the same, no summary, same HTML page.

Next I inspected http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushlog. There I had summary turned on, since I believe there was a difference between summary and non-summary mode. I have to wait for more posts to see the difference again.

It appears that the comment #2 is correct and that not seeing a difference between summary and non-summary mode is a fault of the publisher and not the feed reading software. Now, it occurs to me, have you tried different feed reading software with better results?
While I'm still discussing summary vs. non-summary with a colleague who know feeds better than I do, I noticed that the posts in http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/pcmag.xml have invalid URLs, for example:
//www.pcmag.com/review/351959/1more-quad-driver-in-ear-headphones?kc=PCRSS02129TX1K0000530

Compare this to a BBC post:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39194844
OK, I was really quite ignorant about feed display, but now I smartened up.

Basically for a feed you have two displays:
1) Summary view, which will just display the content of the feed message.
   For the BBC I mentioned above, that's one line of text, for the Tagesschau mentioned
   above, that's a little paragraph with a small picture - nice.
   For your PC Magazine, it's also one line with some links below.
2) Web page, which will load the associated webpage into the preview pane.

Double-clicking the message will always open the web page.

Which display is chosen can be configured in various locations, in the account settings, in the feed subscribe dialogue, and also in the View menu: View > Feed Message Body As.

So far so good.

Now the problem is that the associated web page needs to be stored correctly in the feed message.

Sadly, as I already pointed out in comment #7, for the PC Magazine feed this is not the case. There you have:
Content-Base: //www.pcmag.com/review/351977/fossil-q-tailor?kc=PCRSS02129TX1K0000530

There the "http:" or "https:" is missing in front of the //.

So please always carefully check the web site displayed for a post. If that's invalid, opening the page won't work.

So the feed in question is actually sadly invalid. You can't even double-click the post to get to the web page.

You should write to the publisher and tell them to fix the feed messages.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Hi JorgK,

You do great work!

I have been trying to reproduce the problems I have been experiencing and it appears that you are correct with PC Mag. It seems they changed something to do with their feeds at some point on the 6th March. Feeds before the point of change worked but feeds after don't. I have emailed them. Unfortunately they don't make it easy to find the right person to email!

But I'm still getting strange things happening in Thunderbird which I can't work out. I have to confess that I have no idea technically how feeds work (any pointer to documentation would be much appreciated) but

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/rss

displays the full page

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/rss

doesn't. This issue may well be due to my lack of knowledge on feeds but given this is the same website I had assumed that it was a Thunderbird error.

I'm also getting an error with 

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed

In Thunderbird I get an error that says the feed cannot be found. In Firefox it displays without any issues.

In desperation I decided to create a new Thunderbird test profile from scratch just to ensure that it was not something wrong with my profile. I got the same error message saying that the feed could not be found.

I've no idea whether this is something to do with my installation but the new profile shows no add-ons except for Lightning and I was using a completely new directory for the profile.

I had assumed that Thunderbird and Firefox used the same code to handle RSS feeds so I don't get why one works and the other doesn't.
I'll check those later, if I forget, please remind me.
http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/rss
Works full page, confirmed.

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/rss
Sadly wrong article URL: Web site // in the header, you can really see that yourself.
So you won't get any web content here.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed
Said: "The feed URL is not authorised". Maybe you need to log-on to the site in Firefox and the site will set a cookie or something. I'm not sure how this works in TB.

Thunderbird and Firefox use completely different software for showing RSS feeds.

Magnus and/or Alta88: Can the user view a feed which requires some sort of authentication/authorisation?

OK, Alta88 is not accepting NI requests, so we can't ask him. So perhaps Magnus can help us.
Flags: needinfo?(mkmelin+mozilla)
I didn't understand the "Sadly wrong article URL: Web site // in the header, you can really see that yourself" comment. Is that because the http:// is missing in the website name?

When I enter http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed in Firefox I don't get any authoriztion issue. It just displays the feed.

If I go into TB I get this error in the error console

Timestamp: 07/03/2017 22:43:53
Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </hr>.
Source File: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed
Line: 6, Column: 3
Source Code:
</body>

which makes it rather strange that TB then says the feed url cannot be found since it obviously has found it. 

How can I learn more about how TB works and maybe help out in some way?
I can confirm that the feed works in FF's Live Bookmarks reader and doesn't work in TB. The server response according to the error console is:

<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>

Since the <hr> tag doesn't have a matching </hr> that message doesn't appear to be right. However, the server response to the request in TB was "403 Forbidden".

Once again, I'd try to take up the issue with the administrator of that site questioning them why a TB client receives this message.

I did this experiment: I installed the WebApp Tabs add-on into TB. This add-on allows you to open web pages in TB. I configured it in a way it would open http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed.

When I open the page, I get:
403 Forbidden
-------------
   nginx

So the admin of the site is really blocking TB. I don't know why.
Flags: needinfo?(mkmelin+mozilla)
Further hints:

I added http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/pcmag.xml to FF and got the URL is uses, it's
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ziffdavis/pcmag. That works in TB, too.

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/rss appears to be working now.
Thanks for the update and all your help. I emailed webmaster@honestjohn.co.uk but didn't get a reply. It seems like they fixed without bothering to reply or it was just coincidence. I emailed PC Mag too and got a reply asking for more details but nothing since. I've never run a web server so I was just guessing webmaster@domain-name. Does that always work or is the honestjohn fix just a coincidence?
webmaster@domain-name is pretty much standard. No guarantee that some qualified person reads and answers ;-( I don't have the philosopher's stone, so I can't tell whether it's a coincidence.

The more troubling case is http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/feed. There access to their website is denied to the Thunderbird client, whereas Firefox works, and I assume other browsers.

That's something you should really take up with their webmaster, since it reflects badly on our software which is at no fault here.
Hi Jorg,

I finally managed to get in touch with all the companies whose feeds weren't working and they all now seem to have fixed them. I just wanted to thank you for your help. I really appreciate your time, effort, knowledge and skill.

DLD
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