RSS - duplicate entries

[Cistilya]

I'm getting a lot of duplicate entries in my RSS feed. They appear to be random and I'll get some past article. I'm not sure if I get a new article at the same time or not. (Eg, I only get a dupe when I get new articles.)

[KyrosKrane]

I'm not seeing that on my end, but that doesn't always mean it's working fine.

If you get this to happen again, could you please post the headlines that are duplicated? A screenshot of what you see would also work, and might provide additional clues.

Edit: It's also possible you're seeing duplicates because the titles are often the same. For example, there are currently five headlines in the feed titled "Patch Day" (some with an exclamation mark added).

[Cistilya]

Screenshots

Here are the screen shots. I will take another one when I have new posts come in.

Mozilla Thunderbird - ver 1.5.0.10 (20070221)

[Verdandi]

This sounds like the same thing I encountered when we were testing it, but we chalked it up to my reader, as it was in beta testing. It's still happening...but my reader is still in beta.

[KyrosKrane]

I was able to get this to happen once on Thunderbird, but I didn't get the same duplicates you did in the screenshot above. It's very frustrating, because the source feed doesn't include double entries. Something about the feed is making the client think it's a new entry.

My first hunch was that it might be because we're editing the home page entry. If the summary changes, the client treats it as a new entry. But that doesn't seem right since some of the duplicates were never edited, and others that were edited aren't being duplicated.

Honestly, I'm stumped, and given how finicky RSS feeds can be, I'd rather not tinker randomly and risk breaking the feed entirely. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be more than willing to listen.

[Cistilya]

RSS Feeds

I run an RSS feed for one of my sites, and I only post an article when an update has been made to the site. I create each entry (<item>) by hand and they all contain the same elements, yet in my reader I have one duplicate and four missing entries.

One of the feeds I get though has been very consistant with everything, www.comedity.com , with the feed at http://www.comedity.com/rss.php . I've never had a duplicate entry from them, and I've received every article they've sent so far. Perhaps less is more.

The only other thing I can think of is something wierd with how readers handle CR as opposed to a LF and/or extraneous white space. Eg, I have a text editable RSS file ( http://res10-101.lakeheadu.ca/LUMusic.rss.xml ) and the Comedity RSS file is only editable in wordpad. BTW, my RSS feed views correctly in the IE7 reader.

Hope this helps.

[Cistilya]

Another anomaly

I received new articles today, 1 new dated today and 2 duplicates. This occurred in both IE7 and Thunderbird. Here are links to the screen shots (they're a little big to stick in the board here):

http://www.mckittricks.ca/run/ie7.jpg
http://www.mckittricks.ca/run/thunderbird.jpg

I hope this helps you.

[KyrosKrane]

This has been bugging the heck out of me. It's not an error with the PHP code that generates the feed; rather, it seems to be an error either in the structure of the feed or in how the feed aggregators interpret the feed. It also doesn't help that different readers show different articles being duplicated. And I honestly don't know what's causing it or how to address it.

The raw feed doesn't include duplicates, and I have no idea why these much older entries are getting duplicated. They're not being edited or changed. My only real guess is that maybe the lack of a GUID is causing the readers to somehow get confused and think it's something new. The problem is that we just don't have a GUID for each article since they're all one page. =/ I suppose I could jury-rig up something, maybe a page that displays a single headline, but that seems overkill.

[Cistilya]

I think the bug lies in the readers. I've been trying to figure this one out too. I think less is more. On the Comedity feed, the author only has two tags per article and he's been spot on every single time. No dupes, no missing entries. *boggle*