Podcast Descriptions For Episodes Have Vanished

  • Resolved skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)


    8 years, 1 month ago

    I am stumped on this one guys. I posted a Podcast Episode back on 2/22/16. It was our 76th Podcast Episode. For 75 Episodes before that, we never had this issue. When this Episode posted,the full descriptions for my Podcast Episodes disappeared. The full descriptions had always been there before. I am using Feedburner with Smart Cast and I cannot see where any settings in Feedburner had changed. I tried refreshing the feed on Podcasts Connect, re-synching the Podcast on Feedburner, and anything else I could think of. On iTunes itself, only the description summaries are listed. The full descriptions were always being generated from the show notes on the website which is Following advice on the Bluberry forums, I disabled WP Cache and disabled the Customizer theme I am using to see if that helped but nothing changed. I wrote to iTunes and, to their credit, they came back with this:

    I’ve attached an image that should help with troubleshooting. The podcast feed has the following tag:
    <iTunes:summary/>

    The iTunes summary should be specified as so:
    <iTunes:summary>Description of show here</itunes:summary>

    It seems the podcast is missing the opening summary tag, as so:
    <iTunes:summary>

    and the current closing tag: <iTunes:summary/> should be changed with the slash at the front: </itunes:summary>.

    If you do not specify a <itunes:summary> tag, the iTunes Store uses the information in the <description> tag- and you have descriptions in your feed.
    https://help.apple.com/itc/podcasts_connect/#/itcb54353390

    However, since an <iTunes:summary> tag is provided, the Podcasting apps attempt to look “inside” it, but as they find no text, the summary is blank.

    I’m unsure how this is happening- perhaps seek help in the Blubrry forums for help with the WordPress plugin: https://forum.blubrry.com/

    When I look at the feed though, it is not exactly matching up with what iTunes was apparently seeing. I also noticed that one Episode actually still has the full description. Everything I have tried with the iTunes settings with Bluberry has failed so I am completely lost, especially since I am no expert on RSS Feeds. The feed to the Podcast is here:

    Has anyone dealt with something like this before or can point me in the right direction? Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/powerpress/

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • Plugin Support Shawn

    (@shawnogordo)

    8 years, 1 month ago

    If you’re using PowerPress to create your source feed and you’ve filled out all of the fields for iTunes, etc. properly, turn off Smart Cast in Feedburner and resync the feed. Smart Cast has been known to cause all kinds of problems with podcast feeds and you really don’t need it if your source feed has all of the necessary information it needs.

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for the reply Shawn. I will give that a try and let you know.

    Plugin Support Shawn

    (@shawnogordo)

    8 years, 1 month ago

    Let us know if you have any more questions. And, if the support you’ve received here has provided value, please consider leaving a review for PowerPress: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/powerpress?rate=5#postform

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years ago

    So, unfortunately, none of that worked. There is still one episode where the full description shows and I have spent a ton of time looking at the RSS Feed for that episode and comparing it to the others. I can’t see any difference so I really don’t know what to do. Is there any way to fix this? Is this an iTunes issue, a Bluberry issue, a Feedburner problem, something with Libsyn? I am not even sure who I should follow up with anymore.

    Thanks.

    Plugin Support Shawn

    (@shawnogordo)

    8 years ago

    Post links to the Feedburner feed as well as the source feed so we can take a look.

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years ago

    Here are links to the feeds:

    http://www.attitudeofaggression.com/feed/

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/AttitudeOfAggression

    Thank you very much for looking into this.

    Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    8 years ago

    skinsman68, can you email me, I believe this is a bug in PowerPress, I would like to send you a development version to see if it fixes the issue. cio [at] blubrry dot com. Thanks!

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years ago

    Angelo, could you please confirm your e-mail? I will be more than happy to work with you on this. Thank you very much for looking into this.

    Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    8 years ago

    Yes, cio [at] blubrry dot com. It is written as such to prevent spam bots from harvesting, please replace [at] and dot appropriately.

    Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    8 years ago

    skinsman68, I never got an email from you, but I had someone else with this problem test that the change I made fixed his issue.

    Does yesterday’s update PowerPress 6.3.3 fix your issue as well?

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years ago

    I am not sure what happened but I think the latest Powerpress update must have fixed the issue because all the descriptions returned about 5 minutes ago once I published a new episode.

    Thread Starter skinsman68

    (@skinsman68)

    8 years ago

    Angelo, it does look like the update fixed the problem so thank you very much.

    Plugin Author Angelo Mandato

    (@amandato)

    8 years ago

    Awesome!

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