FeedBurner not updating live

[Rafael Fischmann]

It's been a few days that our FeedBurner feed isn't updating live anymore, and it won't update even if we ping or re-synchronize it.

I've noticed with a couple of other sites that I subscribe to that also use FB, so I believe the issue lies in FB itself.

Our main feed is only updating like 2-3 times per day now.

[bdwalker]

We are in the process of moving all of FeedBurner over onto a new tech stack. We are midway through the planned shift and the UX from the old FeedBurner may not have all features working. The ping/refresh feed is one of those.  The new UX will have a mechanism to ping and refresh your feed immediately. Feeds should have a freshness of around 2 hours so I would expect it to update more than a couple times throughout the day.  However, we recognize the need to immediately have a feed update outside of that cadence so we are working to quickly move over to the new UX to users can again ping and force refresh a feed. 

We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to get everything shifted over ASAP. 

[Rafael Fischmann]

Thanks, understood. Really appreciate your reply and clarification!

We’ll be hoping for a quick migration completion!

[Rafael Fischmann]

I can already see the new, simplified interface, but feeds are still taking a few hours to update.

[Rafael Fischmann]

Still bad. Doesn't even refresh manually… 😪

[bdwalker]

Can you provide me with your FeedBurner feed so I can investigate further?

[Rafael Fischmann]

Sure: https://feeds.feedburner.com/blogmacmagazine

Thanks!

[Rafael Fischmann]

Still the same…

[Rafael Fischmann]

Issue persists — not only with our feed at MacMagazine, BTW, but with lots of sites I subscribe to that also use FeedBurner.

[bdwalker]

Which issue is persisting? Are you able to update/refresh manually or is it a delay in the update of the feed.  At the beginning of September we made some updates to improve the speed at which a feed updates. However, that can still take up to an hour.  I took a look at your feed and it looks like we are grabbing the etag just fine and at least at a cursory glance I don't see any glaring issues.

[Rafael Fischmann]

I'm referring to the delay in the update of the feed. It's still taking 1-2 hours, sometimes 3 hours I think. Used to be in real-time before the migration, won't it ever go back to that behavior?

[bdwalker]

At this point most feeds should be updating in less than an hour and certainly less than two. In order to get any sort of real time update we would need to integrate with Pubsubhubbub so we get push updates instead of polling.  I would like to see this happen but this is not a fully staffed team and for a product in maintenance mode it is likely that this would only get done as a side project. I'm not saying that it never will happen but I also can't make any promises as to a timeline or if it will happen at all. I'm personally going to try to keep making the product better and advocate for updating it as a side project but a lot of these decisions are above my pay grade. ;)

[Rafael Fischmann]

Totally understood, and thank you for your effort + time to reply to this topic! I didn't imagine such a basic behavior of feeds would be "downgraded" with this migration, but here we are. It's sad, but as you said, we can't expect much from a side project anymore.

Quick question: if I were to migrate back my subscribers to my main/native WordPress feed, there wouldn't be anyway to redirect all my FeedBurner feed's subscribers back to the original one, right? Only the other way around…

[bdwalker]

Actually, yes.  When you deactivate your feed we forward all the requests for your FeedBurner feed back to your source feed. This also isn't a destructive action so you can always re-enable later.  So if you go to the overflow menu for your feed and select "Deactivate" all traffic will automatically start forwarding. 

[Rafael Fischmann]

Oh, that's great to know! Thank you very much.

I'll carefully think about that, it might be the way to go I reckon.