Comments for FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings

FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings

2008-09-26T18:02:44Z

Blogging is a fast medium, that's one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google's RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.

]]> Bloggers who contact FeedBurner to complain are being told that the service is changing ping servers, something they are going to announce once all the kinks are worked out. The new ping server URL is http://ping.feedburner.google.com - so if you want to let your readers know about posts hot off the presses, that's where you want your blogging software to send the news instead of the old ping URL. You can ping both servers and the new ping server is just for the feeds that have migrated to the Google Feedproxy servers, but that could well be you.

If you're still pinging the old URL, and you probably are, we're guessing that FeedBurner isn't even noticing. The service checks all indexed blogs for new posts automatically every 30 minutes so that's probably how your posts are getting noticed at all. FeedBurner says both ping servers are still operating but we only noticed the issue after seeing lengthy delays in updating.

The Consequences We Face

We love FeedBurner for all it does for us, but this is pretty irresponsible on their part. We've noticed that our posts are being seen late by Techmeme, subscribers are getting them later and when other bloggers do a blogsearch for a breaking news topic to see who else has covered it - we're not there. It's bad news. Meanwhile the FeedBurner blog hasn't been updated in 4 months.

In response to an inquiry about the issue, Steve Olechowski, Business Product Manager at AdSense (Adsense now being the raison d'être for our beloved publishing tool) told us, "there's nothing secret here, we're just trying to make sure everything works as expected for publishers before we get a deluge of emails about issues we already know about." That seems like a pretty snide response to a common part of customer service - getting emails about issues you already know about.

We're pinging the new server now and we hope that will work. We suggest you update your software as well and we hope that FeedBurner will be more sympathetic to the needs of the bloggers they exist to serve in the future.

Comment from Jeni Hill Ertmer on 2008-10-16

2008-10-17T00:10:48Z

Getting any kind of "tech service" or answers, help with issues one may be encountering with Blogger, Google Reader, Feedburner, etc., is something that I firmly believe to be an unheard of entity! I've been trying for close to three months now to get some type of assistance in resolving problems with my Reader and Feedburner -as well as with RSS come to think of it -all to no avail! My posts to the lovely "Forums" remain unanswered.
My problems began the day that so many folks blogs got shut down with false issues of being "Spam blogs" except my problem was that my blog would not update on my reader. It took me almost three weeks to finally get it to update again -or so I thought -but on my reader, it takes anywhere from 4-8 hours for a new post of mine to update regardless of pings and other tweakings I've tried to do. If I try to use RSS, it shows my most recent post as being August 15th I think -or the 21st or some such incorrect date at any rate. A lot of my problem is being unable to interpret many of the "help" instructions shown and what sucks here is that I am American and do speak, write and generally, am able to understand English but not knowing every little bit of blogging or reader or burner jargon, I find myself feeling like a total foreigner when trying to figure things out. And then, to go to the freaking help -or so-called "help" forums and never get any type of response whatsoever really makes me feel truly like a second-class citizen from a third world entity!
One would think that better assistance, better written explanations of self-help stuff would or should be available via Google/Reader/Feedburner, don't 'cha think?

Comment from Jessica on 2008-10-07

2008-10-08T01:56:13Z

Seems like Google has murdered Feedburner in general. There's absolutely no support anymore. And a product like this, with the usage levels it has, with no support? Yikes. But what is there to move to? And how can you move without a lot of pain in the process?

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-09-29

2008-09-29T22:51:17Z

Kevin (#13), what Gabe said...

And for the record, I have no idea what this url that Matt pointed to is:

http://feedproxy.feedburner.com/ReadWriteWeb

Our old url was:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb

...which now re-directs to:
http://feedproxy.google.com/readwriteweb

Comment from Gabe on 2008-09-29

2008-09-29T21:21:51Z

Steve: huh? So the ping servers aren't "hooked up", yet they "work"? A disconnected ping server is broken by definition. And Feedburner's failures have a huge cascading effect. When Techmeme receives a ping, if the feed it finds is current, the new post can hit Techmeme immediately. When the feed is stale due to Feedburner breakage, the post won't find its way onto the site until the next poll, which can take over an hour. Other aggregators work similarly.

Steve, you guys broke the blogosphere, and your above verbiage reads like a bunch of evasive hooey.

How about accepting responsibility, fixing the problem, and expressing a commitment not to ignore pings in the future? BTW, your blog still hasn't updated since May.

Comment from Matt on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T16:23:40Z

hehehe... you took it easy on them Marshall... besides... 20 minutes is nothing. Try over a month and a half...

don't worry... it'll be over 2 months in no time. (all the hard work y'all are doing as of late, yet anyone subscribed to the following feed would be under the impression you were either really lazy or just stopped all together...)

http://feedproxy.feedburner.com/ReadWriteWeb

**Applause Sign Lights For Google**

I don't believe "FeedBurner" would have ever let this happen... but then again, what must dude be thinking when his best friend turned into a zombie and started eating his face and guts... yeah... it happens, (Google buying companies that is... not zombies).

Comment from Steve Olechowski on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T16:18:03Z

Hi everyone - yes, we are doing a beta test of our new ping server to which we asked RRW to test when they inquired.

We're still in the process of migrating our publishers from FeedBurner accounts to Google accounts, and if you have been migrated, feel free to ping this new URL.

To clarify, both ping servers still work, they just are not hooked up at this point until we get through testing with real publishers and have everyone migrated.

We hear all your pings. Publishers use many variants of the same feed (Atom, RSS, FeedBurner classic, FeedBurner in Google, lower case, uppercase) and we're trying to do the right thing and normalize these all for publishers as best we can for the thousands of clients out there that all consume RSS, Atom, and their PINGs a little bit differently.

We will let the community know when everything is wired together.

@Sai, as a reminder, our ping servers accept HTTP POSTs, not GETs. You will get a 405 if you GET - but we'll make this error a little more user friendly in the future.

Comment from Kevin on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T15:07:15Z

Hi Richard, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but if it actually updates w/in 20 minutes, it may not be working optimally, but I don't think it is broken. A 20 minute delay on your flight leaving the airport could mean you miss a connecting flight. A 20 minute delay on Feedburner acknowledging your ping isn't going to affect your readership. I could definitely understand the distress if it was a couple hours because it could definitely start affecting daily readership numbers and click-throughs and whatnot.

Comment from bob on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T12:24:14Z

I've also noticed that Feedburner isn't delivering emails for my posts. I have a lot of subscribers through email that aren't getting my updates at all. Do you think this has something to do it?

Comment from Sai on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T11:32:24Z

New ping server URL is http://ping.feedburner.google.com is not working it is showing Error 405

Comment from pyrmont on 2008-09-27

2008-09-27T10:48:39Z

Have to agree, Feed Burner is really slow.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-09-26

2008-09-27T05:56:23Z

Kevin, not sure I understand that comparison. We're talking about Feedburner's ping service for blogs - it's sole purpose is to update our rss feed as soon as we publish a post. So if there's a 20 minute delay, it really isn't working.

Comment from Kevin on 2008-09-26

2008-09-27T05:26:55Z

20 minutes isn't that big of a deal. It's still more reliable than most airlines, and you actually pay for that service.

Comment from Livecrunch on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T21:17:15Z

Thanks for the great post, I noticed that about 2-3 weeks ago but I just let it go.

My feedburner url is ok now, had really no problems for past few days now. Also my readership improved by 40% I am still missing few hundreds of readers tho :(

Comment from Frank Sinton on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T20:52:57Z

iGoogle is taking even LONGER to update. I just got a CNN article that was published yesterday talking about the bailout in "disarray". Twitter is becoming a better and better "news feed reader"....

Comment from The Masked Millionaire on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T20:24:19Z

I also noticed that the feeds were not updating on a reliable schedule. I thought I was doing something wrong. But what could that be? Now I know the problem was not me.

Customer Service means nothing.
The Masked Millionaire stands for truth, justice, and the American way!!

Comment from Jacob on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T19:59:28Z

For the lovers of irony, in my feed reader the ad for this post was the Google Toolbar.

Comment from Scott Lockhart on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T19:21:37Z

Interesting... we've also noticed some of their main post feeds redirecting recently to the comments RSS for that post. Kind of annoying. It only started a few days ago...

Comment from Mircea on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T19:10:49Z

Thank you for letting us know so fast!
Too bad they didn't communicate this to people....

Comment from impNERD on 2008-09-26

2008-09-26T18:41:19Z

Thanks for the update, I noticed something weird was going on with feedburner.