340914 - RSS: only headers shown, without content

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Arkady Belousov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; ru) Opera 8.54
Build Identifier: http://mozilla-chi.osuosl.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/1.5.0.4/win32/ru/Thunderbird%20Setup%201.5.0.4.exe

I subscribe many channels from http://forum.farmanager.com/ . For example,
http://forum.farmanager.com/rss.php?f=2&sid=7069ffd9fcce77b0b96299d245b6af68
http://forum.farmanager.com/rss.php?f=3&sid=7069ffd9fcce77b0b96299d245b6af68
but what TB shows for them is only "news" headers - "body" pane remains always empty.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Shai Berger]

This suddenly started for me too. I've had 1.5.0.4 work with no problems for more than a month, but as of this morning, RSS article content is not shown, whether I choose to present the web-page or the summary. All I see is headers. I tried restarting TBird, I tried logging off and back on, nothing helps. Oh, and BTW, for most of my feeds I choose to see the web-page, and the little "working" wheel is not turning at all; it seems like TBird is not even trying to fetch them.

Mail is displayed fine. Clicking the link from the RSS header works. It's just the RSS content window that fails, and it just started this morning.

The feeds I subscribe to include, among others:
Slashdot (http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot),
Lambda-the-ultimate (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/rss.xml),
Resharper news (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharperrss.xml)

I suspect this is related to bogus data in a feed. Until recently, the Lambda-the-ultimate feed was "http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/feed", but that address now returns junk (I hope I can attach it).

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Attachment: Bogus rss feed

Shai ran into a Bugzilla bug attempting to submit the attachment, and mailed it to bugzilla-admin (not something I recommend in general, but as long as I have it...)

Here's the attachment he mentions.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

FYI, attempting to view this file in BonEcho (FF2 prerelease) produces the following error:

XML Parsing Error: junk after document element
Location: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=231185
Line Number 2, Column 587:query: INSERT INTO cache (cid, data, created, expire, headers) VALUES (&#039;filter:1:256cf1ef262d55d8eec2804cd65de149&#039;, &#039;&lt;p &gt;While on the subject of &lt;a href=\&quot;http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1618\&quot;&gt;quantum computing&lt;/a&gt;, I think some of you might enjoy playing with this &lt;a href=\&quot;//www.het.brown.edu/people/andre/qlambda/index.html\&quot;&gt;Scheme DSEL&lt;/a&gt; for quantum computation from André van Tonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#039;, 1153987827, 1154074227, &#039;&#039;) in /home/vhost/ltu/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66.</pre><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

That looks a lot like the script generating the feed crashed in the middle of it, and you wound up with the error message from the database embedded in the middle of the feed.

Comment 4

[Shai Berger]

Just to make things clear: I realize that the feed is broken. The problem is that it broke all of my other feeds to, and updating the address to one that works for the feed did not help either. Right no, T-Bird is useless to me as a feed-reader, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Right no, T-Bird is useless to me as a
> feed-reader, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Still a problem?  If you have just a few feeds, I'd delete the feeds.rdf and feeditems.rdf files and resubscribe.  If there are a lot of feeds, maybe you'd like to try the (risky) business of editing those files to remove all references to the old Lambda feed.  (The files are in the Feeds directory of your profile.)

Comment 6

[Arkady Belousov]

> > Right no, T-Bird is useless to me as a
> > feed-reader, and I have no idea how to fix it.
> Still a problem?  If you have just a few feeds, I'd delete the feeds.rdf and
> feeditems.rdf files and resubscribe.

     You mean, removing account completely and recreating it from scratch should solve problem?

PS: In one my last test (with 1.5.0.5) I see, that one channel becom to show posts content - see bug 340906 comment 2.

PPS: Now showing content of posts now (in 1.5.0.5) appeared some times with news account (clicking on post in right-top pane doesn't shows anything in bottom-right pane)! Fortunately, switching to other folder (group) in this account and then back, solves this issue. But not with RSS account...

Comment 7

[Shai Berger]

(In reply to comment #5)
> 
> Still a problem?  If you have just a few feeds, I'd delete the feeds.rdf and
> feeditems.rdf files and resubscribe.

I deleted all the contents of the feeds directory and resubscribed. The problem persists.

>  If there are a lot of feeds, maybe you'd
> like to try the (risky) business of editing those files to remove all
> references to the old Lambda feed.

I checked the two files. They included no such references.

> (The files are in the Feeds directory of your profile.)
> 

Actually, it was (and is) the "Mail\News & Blogs" directory.

Comment 8

[Shai Berger]

(In reply to comment #6)
> 
>      You mean, removing account completely and recreating it from scratch
> should solve problem?
> 

Not the account ("News & Blogs"), but for me, deleting the whole profile and recreating it does seem to solve the problem.

Comment 9

[Arkady Belousov]

> Not the account ("News & Blogs"), but for me, deleting the whole profile and
> recreating it does seem to solve the problem.

     "Whole profile" - with all mail and news accounts in it? No, this is too much... :( Re-create and tune (join accoints, set signatures, move directories) new profile similarly as current is very hard task - unless there is tool/way to export settings to text files or import settings to new profile from existing one.

Comment 10

[Levien van Zon]

(In reply to comment #1)

> This suddenly started for me too. I've had 1.5.0.4 work with no problems for
> more than a month, but as of this morning, RSS article content is not shown,
> whether I choose to present the web-page or the summary. All I see is headers.

Same here:

I have a number of RSS and Atom feeds in Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 on Ubuntu Linux and 1.5.0.7 on Windows. Only 2 of the feeds are shared by both: http://www.web-log.nl/rss/marjaninedinburgh.xml and http://blog.360.yahoo.com/rss-cphSHFcwdr_ZKOX7cupKyYhTCnFPyGRzmNWf7g--

All worked fine until last week, when suddenly both my computers stopped displaying message bodies for all RSS/Atom feeds. Everything else seems to work fine, and changing view settings does not seem to have an effect.

Comment 11

[Levien van Zon]

(In reply to comment #10)

> Only 2 of the feeds are shared by both:
> http://www.web-log.nl/rss/marjaninedinburgh.xml

Just noticed that this feed is no longer valid (has become http://marjaninedinburgh.web-log.nl/marjaninedinburgh/index.rdf ), but that shouldn't cause all RSS messages to go blank, should it?

-L.

Comment 12

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #11)
> Just noticed that this feed is no longer valid (has become
> http://marjaninedinburgh.web-log.nl/marjaninedinburgh/index.rdf ), but that
> shouldn't cause all RSS messages to go blank, should it?

Unless you've selected 'Show the article summary' for the feed, the item is stored in your RSS folder as a container for an <iframe> which loads a URL based on the original feed.  If that feed changes, the URL is no longer valid, and the iframe will show blank.  (I'm seeing this currently with a feed from Craig's List which has been consistently unreachable for me the past couple days.)

Maybe it would be better if TB showed a 404 or similar error...?

Comment 13

[Levien van Zon]

(In reply to comment #11)

> Just noticed that this feed is no longer valid (has become
> http://marjaninedinburgh.web-log.nl/marjaninedinburgh/index.rdf ), but that
> shouldn't cause all RSS messages to go blank, should it?

Hmm, what I meant was: that shouldn't cause all messages from *valid*
RSS feeds to go blank as well, should it?

Comment 14

[Dominique Unruh]

I had the same problem: Suddenly all RSS items showed only a blank page. Selecting "Show article summary instead of loading the web page" helped, but it applied only to new items (that appeared in the feed after selecting this option).

The reason turned out to be the following:
"View->Message Body As->Plain Text" was selected.

Hot Fix: Choose "View->Message Body As->Original HTML".

Comment 15

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Reporter, does the issue still occur in the latest supported 2.0.0.x / Shredder trunk nightlies?

(1.5.0.x is now end-of-life and the latest supported 2.0.0.x is 2.0.0.16)

Comment 16

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per lack of response to the last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.