Newly published episodes don’t appear for hours and “run now” doesn’t work

  • Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)


    3 months, 2 weeks ago

    Thank you again for developing this plugin! I love it and it’s incredibly helpful.

    In the last few months, it takes a very long time to upload new episodes on my RSS feed. I have recurrence set to “hourly” and have confirmed the RSS feed shows the new episode right away, but it can take upwards of 3-5 hours for the new episode to appear in the feed. When it finally does, the episode is also sometimes dated a few hours in the future, so WordPress doesn’t publish it immediately.

    Additionally, selecting “run now” in the feeds list doesn’t work either. So I have to wait hours for the episode to finally go live on WordPress.

    So I think there’s potentially three bugs here:

    1. Hourly check doesn’t seem to actually import new episodes for a while
    2. Newly imported episodes aren’t set to the correct publishing time in WordPress
    3. Run now button doesn’t work

    I wonder if #1 and #2 are related to some sort of issue with the feed being cached?

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • Plugin Author systemsrtk

    (@systemsrtk)

    3 months, 2 weeks ago

    Hi @master-devwi

    Do you know if your site or host has any caching plugins (e.g., WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache) or server-level caching (Redis, Memcached, Varnish)?
    Do you know if WP-Cron is disabled or replaced with a real cron job?
    When you click “Run Now,” does anything appear in the logs or admin screen?

    thanks

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    3 months, 2 weeks ago

    Thanks so much for your help with this.

    The RSS feed is hosted by Spotify for Creators, which from what I can tell is cached. However, if I manually refresh the RSS feed in my browser a( minute or so after I hit publish) then it immediately shows the latest episode. Here’s the feed: anchor.fm/s/1089b6078/podcast/rss

    And no, I haven’t made any changes to WP-Cron. The plugin shows that tried to update (the last run timestamp updates on schedule), so I think it’s correctly checking the feed on schedule. It’s just not seeing the latest episode for an extended period of time, even if I can see the latest episode in the RSS feed in my browser.

    I wonder if the plugin might need to hard refresh to ensure it pulls in the latest RSS feed instead of the cached version — possibly by appending a parameter like “?nocache=<random ID or timestamp>” to the feed URL before fetching it?

    I don’t see any errors in the log from Sunday afternoon when I last tried to publish the episode.

    Plugin Author systemsrtk

    (@systemsrtk)

    2 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hi @master-devwi
    Sorry for the delay of response, we realeased a new verison 1.0.18
    we added ?nocache=<random ID or timestamp> to fetch proccess
    thanks

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    2 months, 2 weeks ago

    Thank you so much @systemsrtk! I really appreciate your help. I just tried publishing a new episode, but after waiting a few minutes and attempting to manually refresh a few times, 1.0.18 still hasn’t picked it up yet. Just to confirm, the parameter is being appended to every fetch (including retries) and it’s using a random ID or timestamp so it’s different every time?

    If so, it’s possible WordPress’s HTTP API is stripping or normalizing the parameter? If so, wp_remote_get() might help mitigate this? But it’s just a theory.

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    2 months, 2 weeks ago

    Ok, I just did another manual check and it’s now there. It took almost two hours though. Strangely, the episode is set to publish tonight at 10pm Pacific (~5 hours from now) instead of going live immediately. I wonder if there’s a bug in the date logic? The feed has the episode date to 3pm Pacific, which is when I published the episode.

    Plugin Author systemsrtk

    (@systemsrtk)

    2 months, 2 weeks ago

    @master-devwi
    Thanks for the help troubleshooting! I’ve just released version 1.0.20 to address the issues you found:

    • Timezone Fix: Replaced PHP date() with WordPress-native gmdate() and get_date_from_gmt(). This ensures episodes are marked as “Published” immediately rather than “Scheduled” in the future.
    • Cache Busting: Added strict no-cache headers to wp_remote_get() to force a fresh pull from Spotify/Anchor every time.
    • Reliability: Fixed a bug where the “Run Now” button would still see old cached data if the “Optimize” setting was active.

    Please update and let me know if your next episode appears instantly!

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    2 months, 1 week ago

    Thank you so much! I’m excited to test it. It may be a couple of weeks, but I’ll let you know how it goes.

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    2 months, 1 week ago

    I just published a new episode, but it’s still not picking it up right away for some reason…

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    2 months, 1 week ago

    @systemsrtk Unfortunately it’s still not picking it up over an hour later, so something must still be going on…

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    1 month, 3 weeks ago

    @systemsrtk I just tried it again, and it’s still not picking up the episode right away. Any other ideas?

    Plugin Author systemsrtk

    (@systemsrtk)

    1 month, 2 weeks ago

    Hi @master-devwi

    Thanks for the detailed feedback. I found that “Run now” and some scheduled imports could still use cached feed data when the Optimize setting was enabled, so the plugin might miss newly published episodes even when the RSS feed was already updated.

    I’ve updated the plugin so imports now force a fresh RSS fetch with a unique cache-busting parameter, “Run now” bypasses cached XML, and future-dated published episodes are corrected so WordPress won’t schedule them by mistake. I also added a Debug tab to help verify the exact fetch URL, response headers, latest parsed episode, and cron status if this happens again.

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    1 month, 2 weeks ago

    @systemsrtk Thank you so much! I’ll give it a try on Sunday when I publish our next episode.

    Thread Starter Master Devwi

    (@master-devwi)

    1 month, 1 week ago

    That fixed it! Thank you so much! The first attempt to check for updates didn’t find anything, but I clicked it again and this time it worked. I really appreciate your hard work on this.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

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