RSS Feed problems with Mailchimp

  • apalmer123

    (@apalmer123)


    7 years, 2 months ago

    The problem: starting around the beginning of May 2019, our daily Mailchimp email stopped including all the most recent posts. The RSS feed appeared to be broken. Some days there was no email at all even though there were recent posts. There seemed to be a huge time lag ( 7 or 8 hours or more) between post time and when things appeared in the feed. The URL http://mywebsite.com/feed/ showed all the recent posts. but the Feed validator at https://validator.w3.org/feed/ did not seem to get updated regularly. And I noticed that the Mailchimp posts were based on the same feed as the validator showed. I turned off all caching plugins and searched for a way to force the RSS feed to refresh. The solution is to add arguments to the end of the feed URL

    http://mywebsite.com/feed/rss?orderby=post_published&order=DESC

    This appears to force the feed to update. With this URL, the validator shows changes as they are made – updated to changes in the last minutes. FYI, i tried to research arguments on the Feed URL, and apparently there are no standards, so your feed may be different.

    I just wanted to share this with the forum as I spent hours searching for a solution to this problem. I found this under “Update Force RSS?” – a topic from 9 months ago and comments were closed.

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  • audreyshankles

    (@audreyshankles)

    7 years, 2 months ago

    Hi, I think I might be having a similar issue, with the same timing.

    My article was posted, and the pubDate shows this, but lastBuildDate has a timestamp of the day before – could this be messing with how Mailchimp and RSS feeds work?

    In addition: when I preview the email that should have sent (today in fact), it’s the correct email with the correct article. Why would the preview be correct, but the email not send?

    I did have major issues last week with changing over my theme and caching, could this somehow contribute?

    Thread Starter apalmer123

    (@apalmer123)

    7 years, 2 months ago

    audreyshankles, At first I was surprised by the fact that all the times in the feed as shown in the feed validator are UTC times, not my local time (PST). But that was not the problem. The pubdate is for the individual post. The lastbuilddate is when the feed was updated. Be sure and check the feed with the validator (link above) – that’s what I found that Mailchimp uses. I have noticed that sometimes the LastBuildDate is earlier than the article pubDate, but the article was still posted.

    Once I added the arguments at the end of the feed URL, the feed always seemed to contain the latest articles and it seemed to be updated immediately after a new item was published. I’m not sure what’s going on with your preview – every time I tested the preview it was the same as the email that was sent. The only reason I know of when the email isn’t sent is if you forgot to restart the campaign (un-pause the campaign) after making changes.

    I tried deactivating and changing settings with regard to cacheing, but nothing seemed to have any effect. Good luck!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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