399457 - RSS feeds not updating content and new subscriptions hanging indefinitely

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Fred Douglis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.6 (20070728)

I noticed a few days ago that I couldn't add a new RSS feed -- it would hang trying to confirm it.  I only realized today that not only is that problem still occurring, but also no RSS folders have updates since 9/26/07.  I restarted thunderbird and could see from my firewall log that it was successfully downloading quite a few RSS feeds, and it also was prompting me for passwords for a couple of protected ones, and complaining about some bad feeds.  But nothing shows updates and I can't add subscriptions.  Any suggestions?

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling thunderbird, by the way, and I also started in safe mode.  None made a difference.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start thunderbird.
2. Add a subscription.  Get a timeout.
3. Watch for any newly updated feeds. None appear.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

If you get a timeout - firewall/antivirus issue?

If those do not cause it, what are the feed urls? Do you get anything in the Error Console?

Comment 2

[Fred Douglis]

Thanks for the suggestion to look at the error console!  I  didn't even realize it was available to me, and it pointed me to a complaint about a file called feeditems.rdf.  I renamed that away, restarted thunderbird, and sure enough it downloaded every item of every feed :). I have a lot of "catching up" to do, but I'm back on track.  

Feeditems.rdf must have gotten corrupted somehow -- it was a bunch of nulls.  Could thunderbird be more robust in not simply logging something to the error console about a parse error but actually alerting the user, offering to rebuild it, that sort of thing?

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

->INCOMPLETE

Ideally, files shouldn't ever get corrupt;)