288271 - Can't subscribe to feed with identical guid elements in all items

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Daniel Edwards]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2 (ax)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2 (ax)

I am currently running Windows XP Professional with SP2 installed and I am
running Thunderbird build 1.0.2 - 20050317 (not a nightly).  For a while I have
been having this problem with some of my RSS feeds.  I began using the RSS feed
tool built into Thunderbird since its first appearance in the official builds. 
The first time I used Thunderbird's RSS feed, I moved over all of my feeds from
my other program I was using into Thunderbird.  As time went on, some of the
links to the feeds died, and then one of my major feeds (ESPN.com) stopped
receiving new information, so I decided that this link must have died too. 
Until recently I did not have the time to look into the problem and see if there
was a new RSS feed out there.  So, after some searching, I found the RSS feeds
and they were the exact same ones I had before, but just to be sure I tried to
edit the URLs to these feeds to see if I missed something.  It returned with a
message that said "http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news is not a valid RSS
feed".  I tested the links to them at a feed validation site
(http://www.feedvalidator.org/) to see if maybe these feeds had become invalid,
but they tested out fine.  I am confused on why these feeds suddenly stopped
working between after a while.  The last message I received from that feed was
on 1/31/2005.
I am really hoping that my search of Bugzilla was extensible enough.  If it
wasn't, I apologize to everyone who had to read this.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to Tools/Account Setting and then go to whatever you have your RSS account
named.  Then "Manage Subscriptions" and then click "Add".
2. Put in as the feed URL " http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news "
3. Click the "OK" button.

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird will return with a message box that says
"http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news is not a valid RSS feed" and therefore
will not let you add it.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should have let the this feed be added.  That is, if it is valid.

I am pretty sure that this is a valid RSS feed, and I have seen this discussed
on MozillaZine as well.  I think that is why I find it so odd that it has not
been reported before.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

There was a problem with ESPN in bug 253911 (see bug 261007), but it was
supposed to have been fixed in the Aviaray releases (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird 1.0).

At this moment, I can surely read them with Firefox 1.0.1 (can't try with
Thunderbird though). Are you sure it's not a temporary problem with the website,
or maybe your proxy-server ? Are any other RSS feeds that work ?

Comment 2

[Daniel Edwards]

(In reply to comment #1)
> There was a problem with ESPN in bug 253911 (see bug 261007), but it was
> supposed to have been fixed in the Aviaray releases (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird
1.0).
> 
> At this moment, I can surely read them with Firefox 1.0.1 (can't try with
> Thunderbird though). Are you sure it's not a temporary problem with the website,
> or maybe your proxy-server ? Are any other RSS feeds that work ?

I am not behind a proxy, and all of my other RSS feeds work fine.

Comment 3

[Daniel Edwards]

(In reply to comment #1)
> There was a problem with ESPN in bug 253911 (see bug 261007), but it was
> supposed to have been fixed in the Aviaray releases (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird
1.0).

P.S. - It has no problems at all with
http://lidovky.centrum.cz/export/lidovky.rss in bug 253911, I have verified the
spelling of the espn feeds, and it still has the same problem stated above.

Comment 4

[Robert Sayre]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > There was a problem with ESPN in bug 253911 (see bug 261007), but it was
> > supposed to have been fixed in the Aviaray releases (Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird
> 1.0).
> 
> P.S. - It has no problems at all with
> http://lidovky.centrum.cz/export/lidovky.rss in bug 253911, I have verified the
> spelling of the espn feeds, and it still has the same problem stated above.

The problem is that each item in the ESPN feed is carrying the same GUID. We'll have to add a check for 
this. I'll have a patch this evening.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Confirming based on comment 4.  Robert, you might want to assign this to 
yourself, and change the status to Assigned as well.

Comment 6

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

So...any progress here? To me it looks like the ESPN feed has correct GUIDs
again, so no patch needed?

Comment 7

[Phil Feller]

I have this problem with Thunderbird version 1.5 (20051201) on Windows XP. It occurs with every RSS feed I have tried so far (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/7?format=rss2, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/16?format=rss2, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/16?format=rss1, and http://lawsonguru.com/desktopmodules/activeforumstopposts/rss.aspx?tabid=96&moduleid=544.

Comment 8

[rod white]

I have the same problem with 'Poetry Daily':

www.poems.com/rss

I imported the feed from another RSS reader where the feed works fine but Thunderbird will not recognise it. How can I get some action on this - since it has been ongoing from 2005?

Thankyou,

Rod

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

ESPN no longer has repeated guids, sayrer no longer remembers details of the way it was, and I can't construct a testcase with repeating guids that fails, so, WFM. Comments 7 and 8 are not this bug - comment 8 in particular is miles from "Valid RSS"

Comment 10

[rod white]

I think you will find most feeds have problems when you test them in a feed validator. For example I subscribe to the New York Times Books RSS feed, it was also recognised as not being valid and yet Thunderbird recognises it perfectly. I would still maintain that if Thunderbird and other RSS feedreaders such as Feedreader 3.05 can read 'Poetry Daily' why can't thunderbird?

Rod

(Below see results for New York Times RSS feed problems)


Sorry

This feed does not validate.

    *

      line 19, column 28: author must include an email address: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (23 occurrences) [help]

          <author>CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS</author>
                                      ^

In addition, this feed has an issue that may cause problems for some users. We recommend fixing this issue.

    *

      line 13, column 51: Image link doesn't match channel link [help]

          <link>http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html</link>
                                                             ^

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Books.xml

Comment 11

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

You can do things wrong, like driving five miles an hour over the speed limit or not including an email address in the RSS 2.0 author element, or you can do things fatally wrong, like driving over children in a school crosswalk or using bytes which don't make a valid character in your declared encoding in XML, using undefined and unescaped entities in XML, and including unescaped HTML in RSS's description element, and not even getting that well-formed.

And if you are willing to spend enough, in time or money, you can get a lawyer who will perform heroics to get you acquitted of manslaughter, or a feed reader with an "XML" "parser" which will read random not-well-formed garbage, and make random guesses about what it meant. If you want Thunderbird to have such a parser, and in the unlikely event there isn't already an enhancement bug filed for it, then that would be a separate bug, not a part of a "Valid RSS (other than non-unique guids)" bug.